American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

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by Terrance Hayes

AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  Glad someone shot deserved to be shot finally,

  George Wallace. After you send your basket of balms

  And berries for the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham,

  After you add your palms to the psalms & palm covered

  Caskets of the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham,

  I’ll muster a pinch of prayer for you. You are the blind

  Protagonist of a story that begins, “In my previous life

  My work involved returning runaway slaves to slavery,”

  And ends with the image of a black nurse pushing

  Your old ass in a wheelchair. Can you guess what black

  Folk passing empty cotton fields feel, George Wallace?

  I damn you with the opposite of that feeling. I keep thinking

  I’m confessing for the first time, the reason I fear you,

  And you keep asking why I’m telling this old story again.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  You have a gun but to use the bullet

  You decide your wife, having snuggled it

  Under her tongue, should then smuggle it

  Into your pie hole but she swallows it.

  You have a gun but to use the poison

  You have your son dip a rose in venom

  So strong the smell alone will kill someone,

  But the first to die smelling it is your son.

  You have a gun but to use the dagger

  You decide your daughter should dangle

  It beneath her dress. She refuses to endanger

  Her self-respect. You need to find goons,

  Wranglers, wire, gin, ingenuity, cotton gins,

  You need the constitution. You have a gun.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  When I am nowhere near a ledge or knife covered

  In a corridor of fever colored carpet or catching rain

  Bead upon the morning headlights hungering some crash

  To crack & blacken me before a train full of women

  With nose rings & thigh boots, the curved ass of a mother

  With her toddler & the rain still following the hills

  And shoulders of parts of Maryland & New Jersey,

  And the oncoming trains passing inches from head-on

  Headlong into Newark where I almost escaped this path,

  Before remembering the thrill coloring even today’s

  Melancholy delay asleep, awake, the wild haired woman

  Smiling on the stairs before fading, a song in the ear

  Like the broken phone booth I passed in the Village

  Beside a puddle of what could have been crushed tomatoes

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  I cut myself on some glass in the water.

  I was out driving around the stars.

  I was chopping wood out back.

  I was at the abattoir grabbing a snack.

  I was grabbing my phone in the truck.

  I was smoking below the boat deck.

  I was practicing electric guitar.

  I was listening to aspiring laughter.

  I was on the toilet with a magazine.

  I was home awaiting a limousine.

  I was bargaining with the mortician.

  I was laying a great foundation.

  I was practicing trumpet while drowning.

  I was grinding my hooves to nails.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  When MLK was shot his blood changed to change

  Wherever it hit the floor. Like the others,

  Jackson & Abernathy gathered a few of the coins

  For themselves. A few sank into the pockets

  Of the detectives & forensic scientists, reporters.

  A maid sold the penny she found for a pretty penny

  On the black market. It is in a display case beside

  The bullets Du Bois kept in the gun under his bed.

  Bird got so high on horn, he disappeared. X grew

  Large as a three hundred year old tree colonizing

  The landscape. In the game of “chicken” two drivers

  Speed towards each other & if the one who is chicken

  Does not swerve, both drivers may die in the crash.

  This country is mine as much as an orphan’s house is his.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  Later the white boy we once beat like a drum

  Died after crashing his Camaro around a bend

  Off Shop Road. He was an asshole. Ask the baby

  Black boys he bullied at Robert E. Lee Middle School

  Where the Robert E. Lee statue was painted white

  So often over the years it looked like someone

  Covered in a sheet of glue. I would not have liked

  To attend a middle school named after Emmett Till

  Or for that matter, any murdered black person.

  When I was the age of Emmett Till, I reckoned

  MLK was an old man at the age he was killed.

  I am old enough now to know the drum, though beaten,

  Is not an instrument of violence. Nor is a banjo

  Or whistle. I’m sorry I missed the white boy’s funeral.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  It was discovered the best way to combat

  Sadness was to make your sadness a door.

  Or make it an envelope of wireless chatter

  Or wires pulled from the radio tape recorder

  Your mother bought you for Christmas in 1984.

  If you think a hammer is the only way to hammer

  A nail, you ain’t thought of the nail correctly.

  My problem was I’d decided to make myself

  A poem. It made me sweat in private selfishly.

  It made me bleed, bleep & weep for health.

  As a poem I could show my children the man

  I dreamed I was, my mother & fathers, my half

  Brothers, the lovers I lost. Just morning, as a poem,

  I asked myself if I was going to weep today.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  But there never was a black male hysteria:

  As if being called Nigger never makes you

  Disappear. As if the fear of other people

  Never makes you levitate. As if the nuzzle

  Of a bullet can’t poke a hole in your breath.

  As if you cannot drink from the river

  When into the river you disappear & water

  Floods the hole in your breath. You make shit,

  You piss, you calculate mistakes, you can turn

  Stone into metal, you are able to breathe wind. Air

  Touches your skin like medicine & you disappear.

  It’s crazy. It’s as if you are not being hunted

  By hysteria. It’s as if your death is never death.

  You appear, you appear to disappear, you disappear.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  In a parallel world where all Dr. Who’s

  Are black, I’m the doctor who knows no god

  Is more powerful than Time. In a parallel world

  Where all the doctors who are black see cops

  Box black boys in cop cars & caskets, I’m

  The doctor who blacks out whenever he sees

  A police box. In a parallel world where doctors

  Who box cops in caskets cry doing their jobs,

  I disappear inside a skull that’s larger on the inside.

  Question: if, in a
parallel world where every Dr.

  Who was black, you were the complex Time Lord,

  When & where would you explore? My answer is,

  A brother has to know how to time travel & doctor

  Himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  Over-aged, over grave, overlooked brother

  Seeks adjoining variable female structure

  Covered in chocolate, cinnamon, molasses,

  Freckled, sandy or sunset colored flesh

  Expressively motored by a blend of intellectual

  Fat & muscle while several complex & simple

  Emotional frequencies pulse along her veins.

  Must be a careful & moderately self-indulgent

  Cinematographer, modestly self-conscious, reasonably

  Self-important, spiritually self-educated, marginally

  Self-destructive. Must be willing to raise orchids

  Or kids in a land of assassins; willing to wield a fluid

  Expression in the war her lover wages against himself,

  And a silver tongue in the war we wage against death.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  I only intend to send word to my future

  Self perpetuation is a war against Time

  Travel is essentially the aim of any religion

  Is blindness the color one sees under water

  Breath can be overshadowed in darkness

  The benefits of blackness can seem radical

  Black people in America are rarely compulsive

  Hi-fivers believe joy is a matter of touching others

  Is forbidden the only word God doesn’t know

  You have to heal yourself to truly be heroic

  You have to think once a day of killing your self

  Awareness requires a touch of blindness & self

  Importance is the only word God knows

  To be free is to live because only the dead are slaves

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  In the saddest part of the story the brother says

  To the muse of his heartache, Don’t you ever

  Come near my grave. The saddest scene is where

  The daughter’s ghost says to the mother, Don’t

  Come near my grave. The frail speckled shell says

  To the shy yolk it meant to protect, but only held

  Captive, Don’t you ever come near my grave.

  The saddest part of the opera is where Frida says it

  To Diego. The saddest moment is where the gifted

  Says it to the gift giver & the moment where

  The present says it to yesterday: you have to love me

  Better. The moment where the prisoner says it

  To the future & the pastor. The saddest part is where

  The dirt says it to the seeds in the flowers above the grave.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  I remember my sister’s last hoorah.

  She joined all the black people I’m tired of losing,

  All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson,

  Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago,

  Baltimore, wherever the names alive are

  Like the names in graves. I am someone

  With a good memory & better imagination.

  Can we really be friends if we don’t believe

  In the same things, Assassin? Probably,

  Ghosts are allergic to us. Because we are dust,

  Don’t you & I share a loss, don’t we belong

  Together, Brother, Sweetness, Sweetness,

  Sweetness? Poor, ragged Heart, blind, savage

  Heart, I’ve almost grown tired of talking to you.

  AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

  When I am close enough, I am reminded

  Of the mythic orchid called Lorca’s Breath.

  Named by Salvador Dalí a decade after the poet

  Was killed, the flower is said to sprout petals

  The shade of a swollen moon but once or twice

  Before it dies. Also lost was the painting

  Dalí painted of Lorca’s writing hand: a long

  Almost animal shadow crawling over land shaped

  Like a man with the body of a woman. A cuff

  Of celestial texture. A button of ruby. The orchid’s

  Mouth is the shade of pussy, its leaves hang

  As if listening to a lover whisper with her back

  To you. Rumor that this flower first appeared

  Near wherever Lorca is buried, I know to be untrue.

  Sonnet Index

  * * *

  The black poet would love to say his century began

  Inside me is a black-eyed animal

  But there never was a black male hysteria

  Why are you bugging me you stank minuscule husk

  Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous

  Are you not the color of this country’s current threat

  I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison

  I pour a pinch of serious poison for you

  You don’t seem to want it, but you wanted it

  Aryans, Betty Crocker, Bettye LaVette

  Even the most kindhearted white woman

  Seven of the ten things I love in the face

  The earth of my nigga eyes are assassinated

  I’m not sure how to hold my face when I dance

  * * *

  We suppose Ms. Dickinson is like the abandoned

  Probably, ghosts are allergic to us. Our uproarious

  Maxine Waters, being of fire, being of sword

  For her last birthday I found in a used New Jersey

  A brother versed in ideological & material swagger

  But there never was a black male hysteria

  Our sermon today concerns the dialectic

  Something in the metaphor of the bow

  An old woman looks at the rows of clothes

  Maybe I was too hard on Derek Walcott

  On some level, I’m always full of Girl Scout cookies

  America, you just wanted change is all, a return

  You know how when the light you splatter spreads

  If you have never felt what is fluid

  * * *

  Rilke ends his sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo” saying

  Goddamn, so this is what it means to have a leader

  Probably all our encounters are existential

  I’m full of more water than a forest

  But there never was a black male hysteria

  Because he cannot distinguish a blackbird

  Sometimes the father almost sees looking

  It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga

  The subject is allowed up to twenty years

  The song must be cultural, confessional, clear

  A remix of “Pony” by Ginuwine plays

  The umpteenth thump on the rump of a badunkadunk

  Drive like fifteen miles along a national parkway

  After you turn off Shop Road where the flag leans

  * * *

  This one goes out to DeMascas Jackson

  Because a law was passed that said there was no worth

  But there never was a black male hysteria

  Any day now you will have the ability to feed the name

  This word can be the difference between knowing

  Why someone would crowd into a church is beyond me

  From now on I will do my laundry early Sunday

  Otherwise home is the mess laid bare
>
  I thought we might as well sing the fables of sea

  I’d played silence but later realized my word

  Suppose you could speak nothing but money

  One of the most amazing things about me is

  My mother says I am beautiful inside

  A brother versed in spiritual calisthenics

  * * *

  Glad someone shot deserved to be shot finally

  You have a gun but to use the bullet

  When I am nowhere near a ledge or knife covered

  I cut myself on some glass in the water

  When MLK was shot his blood changed to change

  Later the white boy we once beat like a drum

  It was discovered the best way to combat

  But there never was a black male hysteria

  In a parallel world where all Dr. Who’s

  Over-aged, over grave, overlooked brother

  I only intend to send word to my future

  In the saddest part of the story the brother says

  I remember my sister’s last hoorah

  When I am close enough, I am reminded

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My gratitude for the support of the following journals: The American Poetry Review, Baffler, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review (Ink Lit), Kenyon Review, Literary Hub (http://lithub.com/tag/poems/), New England Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day (April 25, 2017, www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/american-sonnet-my-past-and-future-assassin), Poetry, A Poetry Congeries, and Tin House.

  My gratitude for the support of the following institutions: the University of Pittsburgh, New York University, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

  I can’t begin to account for all the love and friendship that made these poems possible. I made you a book of poems. A special career-enabling thank-you to Paul Slovak.

  Many years ago the poet Anthony Butts told me he was writing a book called Male Hysteria. I loved the title and its many possibilities. Alas, the book never came to be. Maybe I’m not even remembering the title correctly. Still think of you, Brother.

 

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