ALSO BY TERRANCE HAYES
How to Be Drawn
Lighthead
Wind in a Box
Hip Logic
Muscular Music
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Copyright © 2018 by Terrance Hayes
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hayes, Terrance, author.
American sonnets for my past and future assassin / Terrance Hayes.
New York, New York : Penguin Books, 2018. | Series: Penguin poets
Identifiers: LCCN 2017057838| ISBN 9780143133186 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525504962 (ebook)
BISAC: POETRY / American / General. | POETRY / American / African
American.
LCC PS3558.A8378 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057838
Version_1
CONTENTS
Also by Terrance Hayes
Title Page
Copyright
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Sonnet Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
bring me
to where
my blood runs
WANDA COLEMAN
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors,
Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset
Bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little
Writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not
Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned,
And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who does not recognize
Her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing.
His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent
His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it.
He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Inside me is a black-eyed animal
Bracing in a small stall. As if a bird
Could grow without breaking its shell.
As if the clatter of a thousand black
Birds whipping in a storm could be held
In a shell. Inside me is a huge black
Bull balled small enough to fit inside
The bead of a nipple ring. I mean to leave
A record of my raptures. I was raised
By a beautiful man. I loved his grasp of time.
My mother shaped my grasp of space.
Would you rather spend the rest of eternity
With your wild wings bewildering a cage or
With your four good feet stuck in a plot of dirt?
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
But there never was a black male hysteria
Because a fret of white men drove you crazy
Or a clutch of goons drove you through Money,
Stole your money, paid you money, stole it again.
There was a black male review for ladies night
At the nightclub. There was a black male review
By suits in the offices, the courts & waiting rooms.
There was a black male review in the weight rooms
Where coaches licked their whistles. Reviews,
Once-overs, half-studies, misreads & night
Mares looped the news. Your jolts & tears gained
Rubberneckers, eyeballers & bawlers in Money,
Mississippi. The stares you got were crazy,
It’s true. But there never was a black male hysteria.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Why are you bugging me you stank minuscule husk
Of musk, muster & deliberation crawling over reasons
And possessions I have & have not touched?
Should I fail in my insecticide, I pray for a black boy
Who lifts you to a flame with bedeviled tweezers
Until mercy rises & disappears. You are the size
Of a stuttering drop of liquid—milk, machine oil
Semen, blood. Yes, you funky stud, you are the jewel
In the knob of an elegant butt plug, snug between
Pleasure & disgust. You are the scent of rot at the heart
Of love-making. The meat inside your exoskeleton
Is as tender as Jesus. Neruda wrote of “a nipple
Perfuming the earth.” Yes, you are an odor, an almost
Imperceptible ode to death, a lousy, stinking stinkbug.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous
Darkness. Probably all my encounters
Are existential jambalaya. Which is to say,
A nigga can survive. Something happened
In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson
And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened
In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens
Almost everywhere in this country every day.
Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters.
You won’t admit it. The names alive are like the names
In graves. Probably twilight makes blackness
Darkness. And a gate. Probably the dark blue skin
Of a black man matches the dark blue skin
Of his son the way one twilight matches another.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Are you not the color of this country’s current threat
Advisory? And of pompoms at a school whose mascot
Is the clementine? Color of the quartered cantaloupe
Beside the tiers of easily bruised bananas cowering
In towers of yellow skin? And of Caligula’s copper-toned
Jabber-jaw jammed with grapes shaped like the eyeballs
Of blind people? Light as a featherweight monarch,
Viceroy, goldfish. Pomp & pumpkin pompadour,
Are you not a flame of hollow Hellos & Hell Nos,
A wild, tattered spirit versus what? Enemy to Foe of
Those Opposed to Upholding the Laws Against What?
I know your shade. You are the color of a sucker punch,
The mix of flag blood & surprise blurring the eyes, a flare
Of confusion, a contusion before it swells & darkens.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a li
ttle room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold
While your better selves watch from the bleachers.
I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow
You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night
In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-
Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars
Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
I pour a pinch of serious poison for you
James Earl Ray Dylann Roof I pour a punch of piss
For you George Zimmerman John Wilkes Booth
Robert Chambliss Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr
Bobby Frank Cherry Herman Frank Cash your name
Is a gate opening upon another gate I pour a punch
Of perils I pour a bunch of punches all over you
I pour unmerciful panic into your river I damn you
With the opposite of prayer Byron De La Beckwith
Roy Bryant J. W. Milam Edgar Ray Killen Assassins
Love trumps power or blood to trump power
Beauty trumps power or blood to trump power
Justice trumps power or blood to trump power
The names alive are like the names in the graves
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
You don’t seem to want it, but you wanted it.
You don’t seem to want it, but you won’t admit it.
You don’t seem to want admittance.
You don’t seem to want admission.
You don’t seem to want it, but you haunt it.
You don’t seem too haunted, but you haunted.
You don’t seem to get it, but you got it.
You don’t seem to care, but you care.
You don’t seem to buy it, but you sell it.
You don’t seem to want it, but you wanted it.
You don’t seem to prey, but you prey,
You don’t seem to pray but you full of prayers,
You don’t seem to want it, but you wanted it.
You don’t seem too haunted, but you haunted.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Aryans, Betty Crocker, Bettye LaVette,
Blowfish, briar bushes, Bubbas, Buckras,
Archie Bunkers, bullhorns, bullwhips, bullets,
All cancers kill me, car crashes, cavemen, chakras,
Crackers, discord, dissonance, doves, Elvis,
Ghosts, the grim reaper herself, a heart attack
While making love, hangmen, Hillbillies exist,
Lillies, Martha Stewarts, Mayflower maniacs,
Money grubbers, Gwen Brooks’ “The Mother,”
(My mother’s bipolar as bacon), pancakes kill me,
Phonies, dead roaches, big roaches & smaller
Roaches, the sheepish, snakes, all seven seas,
Snow avalanches, swansongs, sciatica, Killer
Wasps, yee-haws, you, now & then, disease.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Even the most kindhearted white woman,
Dragging herself through traffic with her nails
On the wheel & her head in a chamber of black
Modern American music may begin, almost
Carelessly, to breathe n-words. Yes, even the most
Bespectacled hallucination cruising the lanes
Of America may find her tongue curls inward,
Entangling her windpipe, her vents, toes & pedals
When she drives alone. Even the most made up
Layers of persona in a two- or four-door vehicle
Sealed in a fountain of bass & black boys
Chanting n-words may begin to chant inwardly
Softly before she can catch herself. Of course,
After that, what is inward, is absorbed.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Seven of the ten things I love in the face
Of James Baldwin concern the spiritual
Elasticity of his expressions. The sashay
Between left & right eyebrow, for example.
The crease between his eyes like a tuning
Fork or furrow, like a riverbed branching
Into tributaries like lines of rapturous sentences
Searching for a period. The dimple in his chin
Narrows & expands like a pupil. Most of all,
I love all of his eyes. And those wrinkles
The feel & color of wet driftwood in the mud
Around those eyes. Mud is made of
Simple rain & earth, the same baptismal
Spills & hills of dirt James Baldwin is made of.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
The earth of my nigga eyes are assassinated.
The deep well of my nigga throat is assassinated.
The tender bells of my nigga testicles are gone.
You assassinate the sound of our bullshit & blissfulness.
The bones managing the body’s business are cloaked
Until you assassinate my nigga flesh. The skin is replaced
By a cloak of fire. Sometimes it is river or rainwater
That cloaks the bones. Sometimes we lie on the roadside
In bushels of knotted roots, flowers & thorns until our body
Is found. You assassinate the smell of my breath, which is like
Smoke, milk, twilight itself. You assassinate my tongue
Which is like the head of a turtle wearing my skull for a shell.
You assassinate my lovely legs & the muscular hook of my cock.
Still, I speak for the dead. You will never assassinate my ghosts.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
I’m not sure how to hold my face when I dance:
In an expression of determination or euphoria?
And how should I look at my partner: in her eyes
Or at her body? Should I mirror the rhythm of her hips,
Or should I take the lead? I hear Jimi Hendrix
Was also unsure in dance despite being beautiful
And especially attuned. Most black people know this
About him. He understood the rhythm of a delta
Farmer on guitar in a juke joint circa 1933, as well
As the rhythm of your standard bohemian on guitar
In a New York apartment amid daydreams of jumping
Through windows, ballads of footwork, Monk orchestras,
Miles with strings. Whatever. I’m just saying,
I don’t know how to hold myself when I dance. Do you?
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
We suppose Ms. Dickinson is like the abandoned
Lover of Orpheus & too, that she loved to masturbate
Whispering lonely dark blue lullabies to Death.
Because Galway Kinnell writes of Saint Francis
Whose touch made a sow ecstatic, consider
How it would be to make every creature shudder
In orgasm. If you got one of your paws on a black-
Bird, you’d see the blackbird shift & shatter like
A vessel of ink. If you brushed the ear of a stranger,
Her jaw & eyes & fingers would
clench on a dark
Blue feeling. If, like the bear in a deep image poem,
You got a paw on a fish in a river, you would feel
The fish convulse like the flesh flooded with blood
And the dark blue crush of touching yourself to Death.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Probably, ghosts are allergic to us. Our uproarious
Breathing & ruckus. Our eruptions, our disregard
For dust. Small worlds unwhirl in the corners of our homes
After death. Our warriors, weirdos, antiheroes, our sirs,
Sires, our sighers, sidewinders & whiners, winos,
And wonders become dust. I know a few of the dead.
I remember my sister’s last hoorah. I remember
The horror of her head on a pillow. For a long time
The numbers were balanced. The number alive equal
To the number in graves. After a very long time
The bones become dust again & the dust
After a long time becomes dirt & the dirt becomes soil
And the soil becomes grain again. This bitter earth is a song
Clogging the mouth before it is swallowed or spat out.
AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN
Maxine Waters, being of fire, being of sword
Shaped like a silver tongue. Cauldron, siren,
Black as tarnation, black as the consciousness
Of a black president’s wife, black as his black tie
Tuxedo beside his black wife in room after room
Of whiteness. My grandmother’s name had water
In it too, Water maker. I have wept listening
To Aretha Franklin sing Precious Lord. I have placed
My thumb on the tongue of a black woman
With an unbreakable voice. I love your mouth,
Flood gate, storm door, you are black as the gap
In Baldwin’s teeth, you are black as a Baldwin speech.
I love how your blackness leaves them in the dark.
I love how even your sound-bite leaves a mark.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin Page 1
