Bad News, Again
after the June 2015 Charleston AME church shooting
after Mary Oliver
1.
There are so many reasons to stay inside, to lock
the room around my heart. I don’t even like it,
my heart. Bitter little fruit, little lead stone,
carnation blooming from a Sunday dress.
What does the world mean if you can’t trust it
to go on?
2.
Listen: birdsong (whippoorwill, maybe) broken
by the wail of a woman prowling barefoot
down the street.
3.
Sometimes, before light breaks, I lace my shoes
& race outside. I try to touch everything—
my neighbor’s rusty wind chime, the fallen
trees. My soles drum the concrete, hands strum
each metal fence.
4.
Listen: hasn’t my body felt like the body of smoke
before?
5.
One morning, on the corner, a girl, still
in plaits, crowned with butterflies, a field
that sang with every motion of her head.
Where was her mother at this hour?
I don’t know. But she looked at me
like a child. She turned her head.
She laughed & laughed at my awful music
& I thought oh. Yes. This is the world
with me in it. It is beautiful. It is.
Walking Lake Calhoun
to a.
In my favorite childhood memory
a blue lip of water is closing above
me & then my mother is pulling
me back up, though she denies it.
You were never drowning she says, love
is no buoy. This is as good a place as any
to begin, watching you descend
the stairs at 32nd St, back into my line
of sight. Here is the circle of my life
& here is yours, tangent extending
indefinitely away & here is the place
where, by definition, they always meet.
Rounding the bend, I almost tell you,
but there’s a monster rising from the water,
which for years killed off someone
close to my heart— massive jaws
opening in the ocean or sometimes,
improbably, appearing to fling
the beloved before a train.
What brought me here?
you’re asking, Loch Ness statue
bobbing still, though out of sight.
What brought me here? My friends
& I live in one apartment building
& once a week drive to a diner uptown.
It’s like being in a sitcom about having
friends, which is nice because
I never have to go outside.
Still, there are at least two worlds
in every person. Sometimes
I look too long at my friends’ faces
& fall through the bottom of our life-
boat & cannot find my way back
into the light & sure, I’m the monster,
sure, I’m the one eating my own heart.
My therapist would call this
a cognitive distortion, but I’m trying
to say that I prefer it, imagining myself
cruel & merely proximate to love.
Let me assure you I don’t believe in us.
Not you & I, storied romance, grotesque
pronoun, what am I without you? & here we
are, back at the beginning. We could walk
another lap? Not hug & say goodbye?
Though it isn’t true, you know,
what I said before.
Something About Joy
I’m alone in a room empty
of me, though I’m in it. The desk
is full of paper cups, still
with the residue of morning
coffee, or afternoon coffee,
or god / that which tethers me
to light. I’m not joking. The joke
is printed on the cups, green
voice reassuring You’re
Making A Difference!
because these cups
are compostable,
these paper cups
bear the Earth,
or at least its image
but I can’t see the forest
from here, the blade
descending
on a child skipping
out into the death field
to fill the cup I cradle
in my palm like a songbird.
Little joy & then it flies.
Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and the chapbook Transit (Button Poetry, 2015). A Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine, their poems have appeared/are forthcoming in The Journal, The Offing, Vinyl, Nepantla, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Cam is currently a doctoral candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University and has essays forthcoming in Science Fiction Studies and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
