River

am I the bathtub full of your spring weeds if you’re
coming bring a raincoat I’m under a woolwhite river

of clouds so dense whatever where cotton built
cathedrals that praise what blood buys our river

drowns us out like that holds me how you hold
a cottonmouth in a crosshair quiet angel of the river

listen in the tall grass the soldiers are surrendering
to the applause they owe the countryside and a river

of mothers who tend it under someone else’s flag
when a senator sells a resource he means a river

I am being interrogated into unbelievably small
ladybugs your voice a radio a rainshower a river

rushing when the police come with hands for your love
-d ones become a mob in neon shouting become a river

under the stars more light than I can put here     heavier
than expected even so wreath me in it     the river

loves the risk go past the barnbrambles to taste it
before they catch your arms moving moonlit and river

-ly like the light that fell against the prison floor
while Etheridge wrote his poems I want to be a river

like that full of the kind of applause it takes to live
through a revolution and into another river

-heavy heaven that could be called home where our
lives aren’t demands we graffiti on the levee wall of the river

in the innards of a clay pot a soldier’s ear
unearthed from the meadow a thread of river

yearlong      in the humidity I heard my name came up
-heaved hear that? our fathers breaking cane across the river

Copyright © 2024 by C. T. Salazar. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 23, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I love the ghazal, but I have never written one I’m happy with. This isn’t a ghazal, but a gesture toward some of the beauty I love in the form. I’m thinking of what it means for a poet in the heart of a colonizing empire to appreciate a non-Western form without the need to conquer it. My own empire commodifies the labor of my neighbors and kills them or jails them in the production. At every junction, we have to remember where all of this comes from, lest we start to believe all of this was inevitably already ours. Can I write a poem grounded in the Mississippi Delta without also grounding it in the geographies of all my home’s imports and exports and people that live here and live through here? I want to know the ways a poem can reveal how racial capitalism connects all of our geographies—connects and collapses—while also convincing us that some great distance separates our suffering.”
—C. T. Salazar