In Bass Pro Shops, fifty cents will get me twenty rounds at the shooting arcade. A shooting arcade is another name for a catch-and-release rifle. I would like to understand the thing that broke in me when someone aimed not a gun at my father, but a whole plane. I can hear the broken thing rattle as I walk.
The secret to enjoying camouflage-colored jellybeans is to ignore how they look in your palm. Uncle Buck’s hostess wants to talk Happy Hour specials. The Harlingen Outdoor World has a tank fashioned like a cross-section of a lake. Perch, catfish, and bass the color of dishwater circle and gawp. Bass Pro Shops puts in five entrances and a loading dock and calls it the outdoors. Bass Pro Shops puts a roof on something and calls it a world.
NON-COMMISSIONED: A QUARTET
A Golden Shovel
after Gwendolyn Brooks,
“Gay Chaps at the Bar.”
I.
No one chose us. We
chose ourselves. What a man knew
in the concrete embrace of bunkers—how
or who—would never make it to
the foxhole. A sergeant catches the order
as it trickles down his just
commander’s leg. We hauled the
water. We led the dash.
We’re the vertebras necessary
so the skeleton can dance. We’re the
eighteen rounds in the length
of a minute; the fifty pounds of
an M1928 haversack. We’re the gayety
of five-card draw in
dead night, the muffled barter of good
smokes for bad booze. Privates taste
fear. A corporal will spit it out. Whether
a man remembers to thread the
diaper of his pack: the stuff of raillery,
except when it should
save your life. We chose to be
grenade men. There was no slightly.
There is no plum butter, no bread, no iced
tea, no lemon. There is a meat can, and
there may be meat in it. What’s given
to a boy as he trembles, as he turns green,
is the lesson of swim or
goddammitswim. You serve or are served
on a stretcher. Once home, belly up
to the bar and speak of the hot
dusks—how you aimed the mortar—and
remember us, who stayed in the jungles lush.
II.
The difference between liver and
foie gras, we were taught, is in how we
hold a beast’s head before feeding. We knew
the throat lining to be beautifully
calloused, like a palm. We learned how
to load the gavage, to
simmer corn in fat to give
their flesh fat in return. They told us to
keep the men. We discarded women
after hatching and the
smell was foul, but so goes summer.
We could almost taste the spread,
rich in iron, surrendering to a tongue the
way an ice cube melts in the tropics.
Nothing was wasted and of
the lies they’ll tell, that’s the worst: that our
care was a form of waste. It was love.
Everything stings less when
shot with rye. We took time to
pin tin to each swollen breast, to persist
even when they hollered or
the cage held more than it could hold.
We stroked their throats and called it a
sign of hunger
if they swallowed. We took off
shoes that shone with their filth. We knew
their feathers would not stay white.
No one had to give that speech,
nor show us how
their eyes would glaze when ready to
slaughter. How can I make
you understand? This is not a
form of betrayal. Look.
In the field, the officer’s job is to make an
office: anything else is an empty omen.
III.
But
nothing
ever
taught
us
to
be
islands.
IV.
If a mother cradles her son’s face and
praises how brave he is, how smart,
how nimble or athletic,
she is teaching him the language
of easy victory—ten points scored for
his team, the test aced, the prick of this
needle to which he did not weep. An hour
in the trench offered what was
a different dictionary. We do not
speak of smart, or brave, or honor in
battle. That’s for telegrams to the
parents, the posthumous curriculum.
Little sprinter, you have no
advantage in this marathon, no stout
legs to carry you to the finish line’s lesson.
Those soldiers who showed
grace with a bayonet understood how
the body must become a weapon to
be wielded; how every chat
is a conversation with
the self we want to save; how death
listens in, nodding. We
laughed at the lieutenants who brought
photos of sweethearts, because no
girl wants to kiss a mouth full of brass.
If the only volume is fortissimo,
it’s not music that’s playing. Among
every hour, what I recall is our
silences. Our greatest talents—
accomplishing with a look what to
a weaker man required a holler.
We raised them. We laid them down.
We learned faces but not the
names, and we left lording to the lions.
The roof of the house I lived in
had a chevron’s peak. I took in this
breath and then there was no other air.
LAZARUS
The cat flops and swims along the carpet,
ecstatic in her clawing, because I am alive,
despite the three days’ absence that she took as
my death. She could vomit in sheer joy,
and later she will, but for now
it’s head-butts and pantomime of mewing
with her jaw that ached and ran dry of sound
after my first night gone. Though I know
each of us would be better off
if she did not care quite so much, if
she displayed the feline diffidence promised—
water, kibble, company, she’ll be fine—
I confess to delighting in this small miracle
I perform in her eyes, this
resurrection. After a brief pause
to lovingly tend to her own asshole,
the cat resumes her yawp and purr.
Could I learn to greet the world this way,
to take nothing for granted? First
I’d have to think you all had died, of course,
but death would be temporary.
Truth is, I’ve tried odder routes to ecstasy.
EPIC
After C. P. Cavafy’s “Ithaka”
As I set out for home—
back home to my apartment,
to my vengeful cat, back home
to a betrothed who never
was one for textile arts—
I hope the voyage is a long one.
I hope that Homer finds me
on my great journey,
on a bar stool in Ocala
one March Sunday at noon,
though it occurs to me
after I am served
the bowl of boiled peanuts
that my hunger in this moment,
is not heroic. Who am I
in these stories? One by one
I shell those soft
bodies,
warm against my bottom teeth,
tipping meat into my mouth.
Did they, too, once have names?
Did they once have sons?
How silly they look, in their little boat
with its checkered placemat sail.
I take a swig of a Bloody Mary,
spiked with ocean and jalapeño,
the one eye of my forehead pulsing.
I will get back in the car.
I will drive another 800 miles
with Aeolus’s bagged breath
stashed in my glove compartment.
And if I find home poor, home
won’t have fooled me, I
who have forged a life
that consists of leaving my life.
I’ll recall I once sat at a bar
wiping Cajun broth from my chin
with a twelfth cocktail napkin.
Blame Nobody, I sang,
Nobody—
Nobody—
Nobody did this to me.
Acknowledgments
Poems previously appeared, often in earlier versions, in Agni, The Arkansas International, Bennington Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal, Copper Nickel, Gravy, The Mackinac, the Nation, the New York Times, Oxford American, Poetry International, Salamander, The South Carolina Review, Southern Indiana Review, SWWIM Every Day, and Waxwing.
“The Sniper Dance,” “Weak Ocean,” and “Bass Pro Shops” won the Adult Poetry Category of the 33rd Annual Larry Neal Writers’ Awards (2016), administered by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. “Non-Commissioned: A Quartet” won the 2015 C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International.
“Elephant,” “Hains Point,” and “The Sniper Dance” appear in Written in Arlington, edited by Katherine E. Young (Paycock Press, 2020). “Still Life with Sex” appears in Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse, edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby (Literary House Press, 2016). “Non-Commissioned: A Quartet” appears in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith (University of Arkansas Press, 2017). “Kiss Me” appears in Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, edited by Danielle Barnhart and Iris Mahan (OR Books, 2018). “Jefferson, Midnight” appears in The Eloquent Poem, edited by Elise Paschen (Persea Books, 2019). “My Whitenesses” appears in We Hold America: Poetry from the New Labor Movement, edited by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones (University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming 2022).
“The Conversation” was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets in October 2014 to celebrate National Archives Month, and “Say the Word” was featured in Poem-a-Day, January 2020; along with “American Rome,” these poems are archived at Poets.org. “Weak Ocean” was featured as Kore Press’s Poem of the Week in 2016. “Death by Chocolate” was featured in “We Will Not Be Exorcised,” a New York Times Opinion portfolio on disability in June 2019, edited by Jillian Weise and Khadijah Queen. “Customer Service Is” was featured as Split This Rock’s Poem of the Week in April 2018, received a “Best of the Net” nomination, and is archived in the Quarry online database; it also appears tandem to “Roundtable Discussion on Poetics and Disability,” presented by Poetry International in May 2018.
***
My thanks to the team at W. W. Norton, including Jill Bialosky and Drew Weitman. I am grateful to early readers including HL, MT, GB, JC, AS, EM, BFDB, KD, DAM, AH, CG, NEI, ELR, and members of the D.C.-area poetry community. Support for writing this collection came from the Munster Literature Centre, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, as well as in the form of camaraderie with the University of Tampa Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program, the Southern Foodways Alliance, and the Disabled & D/deaf Writers Caucus. My love to my family (Beasleys and Pruetts), to the Taylors and Waechters, and particularly to Champneys Taylor.
ALSO BY SANDRA BEASLEY
POETRY
Count the Waves
I Was the Jukebox
Theories of Falling
NONFICTION
Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl:
Tales from an Allergic Life
AS EDITOR
Vinegar and Char: Verse from the
Southern Foodways Alliance
Copyright © 2021 by Sandra Beasley
All rights reserved
First Edition
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Names: Beasley, Sandra, author.
Title: Made to explode : poems / Sandra Beasley.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2021]
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