Labor

If you have the body for it, you’re bound for the fields

to pick strawberries and coax the milk from cows,

or hired out to make baking powder biscuits and gravy,

to sweep floors and wash and fold a stranger’s clothes.

You come back on a truck after sunset, raw and ragged, covered in flour, tobacco, or clay. You come back bone tired and bruised, burned dead out and ready to be shut away.

You sleep.

I know all this from stories. I do not have the body for it.

I do not go to the fields, or the barns, or the parlors of other folks’ houses.

I wake up at sunrise, when they wake the rest, lie in bed

til somebody hauls me out and puts me by the window. Lord, I know

to want to work’s a foolish thing to those who’ve got a body built for working.

I was as close to born here as you can get, brought twisted and mewling

to the gates and left. Since then, I am one long echo of somebody else’s life. Every understanding that I have is scrap, is shard, is secondhand.


Distance: the space between the porch railing and the rise of the Blue Ridge.

Water: what comes from a bucket to my body on Sundays; what I open my mouth for, morning and night.

Sex: The days the girls come back smelling of whiskey, snuff, and sweat, and something sharp.

Brotherly Love (Excerpt)

Dressed for work, George came down the stairs. His parents weren’t talking, so he took some bread, slathered some hummus on it, and jammed it into his lunch tin.


“Have a good day,” he said to silence. Mama shuffled around in the kitchen, slamming dishes, wearing her martyr expression, and Baba sat drinking his coffee. As George shut the door, he heard his mother mutter to no one, “She’s not getting my gold.”


He headed down 16th, then to Shunk Street towards Broad. His work boots felt heavy on his feet, and he wished he’d worn his short-sleeved uniform shirt because it was still warm for September.


There were two cars to work on today — a transmission job on a ‘70 Chevelle. Easy. The other one was more tricky — a ‘61 Buick Electra that wouldn’t start, and its owner was worried like it was his child. It would take George most of the day to experiment, to figure it out. That’s why he loved mechanical work — he liked puzzles that actually had a solution. That felt fair.


Today, when he arrived, Mr. Lerner would ask him how things were going with Linda. When George told him he’d proposed, he’d say in a drawl, “Aaaand?” Then George would say, “She said yes,” and Mr. Lerner would offer him a firm handshake, tell him women ruin your lives, and then chuckle and say, “Go on, clock in.”


That would be it — that was how people normally reacted to good news. No yelling. No tears. No “You haven’t given any of the girls at church a chance.” That was his mother. His father had just stared at him in shocked silence, until Mrs. Khoury yelled, exasperated, “Talk! Say something to your son.”


And Mr. Khoury had sighed, and muttered only, “This was always my nightmare about America.”

Lord Fear: A Memoir (Excerpt)

In the old industrial city back East, I wake up early and take the dog to shit on a little dirt patch by the edge of a parking lot on the corner. I’m spacing out, and I look down to see her nosing a hypodermic needle that’s been javelined into the dirt. There are fresh blood flecks around it. I pull the dog off and hear a motor running. A few feet away, someone parked for the night to get high. The window is cracked just enough so they don’t suffocate; the heat is on so they don’t freeze to death.


These are the small moments that still mean too much to me, that I have a hard time walking away from quickly. I stand over the car, staring through the cracked window. It’s a boy, younger than me. His seat is reclined as far back as possible. At first I can’t see him breathing and I don’t know what to do, but then his chest moves, just a little, up and down, and then again. Then he shivers in his sleep. I put my hands on the roof of the car and lean closer. He looks ordinary. Everything about this is ordinary.


It’s the commonness that’s most wrenching.


This is a good parking lot to get high in; they never tow. When this boy wakes, he will drive away and do this again somewhere else because that’s what he does, that’s what a lot of people do. Eventually, I assume, he won’t wake up. I have this urge to tell him, Hey, I knew someone who didn’t wake up. Not as a warning or anything, but because maybe he would be interested.

It's not that I want to say

It’s not that I want to say that poetry should or can be disconnected from having something to say; it’s just that everything I want to say eludes me. But if I caught it I wouldn’t want it and I imagine you wouldn’t want it either. Maybe poetry is what happens on the bus between wanting and having. I used to think it was what happened on the bus between Oakland and Berkeley. And it was, too, like violet and Texas in peoples’ voices, a whole bunch of subtle transmissions broken off by stops and bells, the percussion of riding, mobile contact, slow symposium. But now, even in the absence of my private office, I still want to move and so I have to move but never get there in this whole extended region of not being there, of stopping and saying not there, not there, and of that being, in the end, pretty much all I have to say. What I want to say is that having something to say is subordinate in the work of being true to the social life in somebody else’s sound and grammar, its placement in my head, my placement in the collective head as it moves on down the line. The itinerant ensemble arrangement of the 40, and sometimes of the 15, is also where I began to learn to move and live and think in poetry. Now I want to transfer what I’m learning as a practice of revision on the edge where ethics and aesthetics are in parallel play. Some kind of homeless shift between reading and writing that emerges in a class or set as our cut-up schedule, a diverse list of things, point to point restlessness, interlocking schemes of material breaks, the constantly renewed syllabus of a new composers guild in the middle of enjoying itself. What we will have come together to try to do would start to look like what we were doing when we came together to enjoy ourselves, handing over saying what we want for one another, to one another, in and out of words.