from “The Laceration”

As if the tender body is. As if the will is tender.
 
And like any creature that has its hood up, you
 
take a photo of yourself in front of a window, rain
 
so dark, the day/perspective so desired. You are so
 
desperate for beautiful adventure, the lights shut off
 
and the sweat of some hot stranger in your mouth. As if
 
to say “before” is to enter a house filled with teenagers
 
piled on top of each other. Did I tell you that it’s raining?
 
It’s not hard to think that it’s already night and necessary,
 
how any green is a wild form, and lastly, I don’t want to
 
inspire devotion if it means the I becomes separated from the world.
 

* 

 
To travel into and out of place […] swift unnature of staying
 
becomes a frequency […] you can no longer hear, the construct
 
of happiness, for example, how we long for a heartbeat.
 
Cement lot […] aching willow tree, our bodies [before] beneath
 
splay, all sinew and glean, black drape and raw confidence. It’s 1986
 
and freedom is something inevitable, the way brown boys run
 
shirtless, invisible siren roaring toward a fit mouth to bit it, O
 
from saying lightness, from—
 
What is the opposite of devastation? Fruit?
 

Copyright © 2021 by Dawn Lundy Martin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 13, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I’m reading from The Laceration, which is an ongoing project begun at the beginning of the pandemic. The poem attempts to speak as if a giant hole has been ripped in the sky. What cushions the experience is nostalgia for the past—what makes us feel alive.”
—Dawn Lundy Martin