Between the World and [Him]...

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in brutal prose of his experience as a black man in America where he uses his body as a motif for the realities of existing in a place that is built on the destruction of bodies. It is a letter to his son that tells of growing up in Baltimore, the school system, his family, his college education at Howard and his time overseas--of the recent spate of well publicized deaths of black people at the hands of police officers and of a man named Prince Jones whose story comes to us in part from Prince's mother's perspective, a woman born of soul crushing poverty who had risen through hard work, determination and persistence to be a successful medical professional and had built a home and life based on all of the rewards she has earned, but her son, too, was killed. Those rewards could not save her son. Coates is the sum of his experiences which have led him to fear for the safety of his son, and, while his son grows up in a different world than he did, it is still too familiar to allow complacency to undermine one's ability to forget the road traveled. To forget that road is to forget the lessons and warnings that portent the ever-present possibility of the destruction of one's body.

Checking Traps

The sun had set but it was still light and I had to get over and check the traps before I lost the ability to see. Snow clung to my boots and it was deeper than I had expected. There was no sign in the snow ahead of me and the small aspen tree cut down by a beaver, all of its branches removed, had a small pile of snow on every part of it. Feeling had returned to my right hand as I slapped it against my side to get the blood moving again. I wondered what I would find, and I wondered what I would do once I found it.

The meadow gave way to an opening in the brush that led to the trail that ran behind and below the pond, past the rusted old Franklin stove and along a deer trail to the edge of the beaver dam. I used the ice pick I carried with me to test the dam in front of me, covered with snow, concealing the holes and uneven footing. A soft gray slush covered the pond and I could hear the trickle of water running over the top of the dam creating a small pool behind it with a stream that ran into the rushes and disappeared. Snow blanketed everything except the running water and in the failing light the scene took on a magical aspect. The stakes used to hold the trap in place in the deeper water before the outflow over the dam were still in place and so was the stake that held the chain of the trap. Nothing had set it off yet. With a feeling of relief, I turned around and headed for the second trap, this one in a small channel between the rushes off to the side of the main body of the pond. Darker still, I knelt in the slush, and delicately felt down into the water with my bare hand probing slowly for the top of the metal frame of my trap for any sign that it had been tripped. My fingertips felt two bars of cold steel still in place beneath the surface. I replaced the sticks and limbs used to conceal the top of the trap and made my way in the dark back to the truck. There would be no work to do tonight.

Dragonfly Dream

crushing sadness a monarch floats over the meadow

a mouse steals through blades of grass

a dragonfly dips through milkweed jungles

transcendently curling

rolling, darting, falling - full

from his insect world to mine

I ride upon its thorax

feeling its wings fuel

movement defying gravity

musculature beneath this thin exterior

defying belief

the ground comes close and then disappears

into a perfectly blue sky

contrail bisected as others

ride a metal thorax to

another world too

Window Moon

Window Moon

In the windy moonshine womb,

through lilac latticework,

shadow mice race

over a patch of earth;

menstruated other--

together we slough

the tongues of ego,

bounded sinew night.

Smoke curls

flex and float from the chimney

tonight.

alone survivor

alone survivor

In a war porn country

gratuitous explosions

destroy entire bodies

for the hero to see,

and the hero too, while

we be the hero, 
masturbating in this mirror

we munch on popcorn

wiping our lubricated fingers

across the thighs of our jeans

silent but for the mastication

of tender images

vicariously sucking 
amorous vats of sugary soda and

pick flesh off the

zippers of our jackets

while an M4A1 Carbine rips

lines of latex death

tearing through the torsos of earnest young men,

faces pasted in filmic fear

contort in a single take

but for the grave

stone stare, transfixed,

penetrates us.

As I wave to the person in the car driving towards me-

Greetings, fellow traveler. I acknowledge you as a member of the race of humans, of which both you and I are one. Welcome to this moment in the world with me as we pass by one another, serendipitously and meaninglessly, at once, witnessing its appearance and disappearance together, the evidence of which is this, our mutual acknowledgment of it. Thank you.

a furnished life

kitchen counter still

in the center of night

formica plain, carrier of ware

we sleep not

to the green glow of Mr. Coffee’s eye

or the metronomic lullaby of the tap

refrigerator belly growls

furnace exhalations through tin wind pipes

these mechanisms are removed

from the blood and pump and pictures

of our sleep

but the house lives too--

not just we and you