Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
GEORGE FLOYD
terrance hayes
You can be a bother who dyes his
hair a striking Dennis Rodman
blue in the face of the man
kneeling in blue in the face of his
badge and wrist watch your mouth
is little more than a door being
knocked
out of the ring of fire around
the afternoon came evening’s bell
of the ball and chain around the
neck of the unarmed brother
ground down to gunpowder dirt
can be inhaled like a magic bullet
point of view of transformation both
kills and fires the life of the party
like its 1999 bottles of beer on the
wall street people who sleep in the
streets do not sleep without
counting yourself lucky rabbits
foot of the mountain
lion do not sleep without
making your bed of the river
boat gambling there will be
no stormy weather on the water
bored to death any means of
killing time is on your side of
the bed of the truck
transporting Emmett til the
break of day Emmett til the
river runs dry your face
the music of the spheres
Emmett til the end of time
Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm
¯\_(‘.‘)_/¯
It appears I will never be remembered
as a great singer nor extravagant eater.
Either I am standing or I am dreaming.
Or I am standing near the mouth of a theater.
¯\_(: )_/¯
One early and deeply progressive symptom of the Ka’a Virus: a stream of movies seeps into the shell of the infected individual’s sleeping. Dream factors greatly in the disease.
¯\_(‘-‘)_/¯
I accept I may never get over the ways my mother loved me poorly. She is close to god in me. On a
planet without sure(re
gods & mythologies, there is family.
¯\_(–)_/¯
Inside the stream of Whitney Houston’s
voice, Dionne Warwick warns,
“You’re gonna need me one
day. You’re gonna want me back in your arms.”
¯\_(‘.‘)_/¯
Often right after taking a photo you immediately crop or color the image so it seems
the doctored thing is the memory.
I’m not saying you have to lie to dream.
¯\_(: )_/¯
I am listening to the sound under
someone repeating something that changes depending on the weather. The entire
roof of my head (lls with strangers.
¯\_(‘ ‘)_/¯
Matisse liked to have the nude near to see her, but Picasso liked to close his eyes upon her. What I remember of 1987, is mostly what I remember of ’88 except with di)erent deaths & births.
¯\_(: )_/¯
If you watch Vertigo as a kind of allegory
a*icted with the Ka’a Virus, you may
notice inside the movie is a whole other possible story told from the point of the young lady.
¯\_(–)_/¯
Each new pair of glasses assures things
never look the same, but several glasses
of liquor can create the same feeling.
Balance the morass and the molasses of jackasses.
¯\_(‘-‘)_/¯
Even where I doubt the presence
of God I am awed by the scale of creation, the science suggesting all that happens
is coincidence, is nonsense.
¯\_(‘.‘)_/¯
“Intrepidation.” “Misfortunate.” “Ya-licious.” “Holy smoked turkey.” “Attack of the third dimension.” I
continue to half believe a fourth “s”
resides somewhere inside the word “obsession.”
¯\_(: )_/¯
After bouts of daydreaming I log sleep
like a marathoner given a number before the run, like a numbers runner, like the bookkeeper in a
beekeeper weighing the queen’s honey.
¯\_(: )_/¯
I stream the sequel to a terrible disaster
movie where the protagonist searches for a lover with the support of characters who meet
catastrophe helping the main character.
¯\_(‘-‘)_/¯
The gun is lowered but then a toe
or two in the boot is shot & when the shoe comes o), there’s hole a grandchild or two a generation or
two later can put a (nger through.
¯\_(: )_/¯
Before the sleeping dream,
we are told to keep nickels in the glasses
of wine by our beds. The virus seems
to have some relationship to cash.
¯\_(‘.‘)_/¯
“All Ka’a Virus sta) & personnel
at work for your personal well-being station on earth: the time is now well
past. And it is nonstop. We are singing signing on.”
¯\_(‘-‘)_/¯
I was struck by the sky of my South
Carolina. It made my mouth ache.
I was old by the time I heard the prophet
Isaiah used to preach naked.
¯\_(: )_/¯
Ghost, the loss that broke you was so
ubiquitous, I failed to see it lingering in the ether like the misspelled a)ections that go
undetected by both letter writer & letter reader.
¯\_(–)_/¯
Often I confuse “Vivamus moriendum est,” which means “Let us live, for we must die,” & “Bibamus
moriendum est” which means “Let us drink, for we must die.”
¯\_(: )_/¯
Isamu Noguchi sculpted the marrow
of a black stone into bamboo & planted husks of live bamboo shoots to guard it. I know
this ragged clock waits to be clogged with dust.
Muscular Fantasy
I was thinking about that museum
with just the one painted stamp people
pay big money to stare at minimum
an hour at a time by a painter of people
who have been old for a very long time.
Sarah Beth Bess of Peducah, Old Walter
Thom outside Paris Island, the most senior
clients of most of the low country senior
homes.
There used to be a country where
no sad songs were allowed out loud
because
making the king blue was outlawed.
The girl falling down the well sang without pause
as she fell. People described it as gospel.
The boy in the well sang as well as a
small bell & the people said it sounded
like babble. Rising in life-like detail from
the middle
of the stamp sized painting is an ornate
mountain. My people moved further south to
the beaches instead of moving north after
reconstruction. “Blessed,” my father said
when I asked if he’d
rather be blessed or lucky. Soda in a can taste
better than soda in a bottle but beer in a bottle
taste better than beer in a can. It’s better plus
less stressful to think the best of people.
The worse thing about scared people
is they go around scaring other people.
Who you are with your mamma,
People, is not who you are with
other people.
The color of my mother’s thumbs up emoji
is unchanged either because she’s not
estranged by such things or because she
doesn’t know the shade of her thumb can
be changed.
The painter can be seen painting a
small painting through the window of a
modestly decorated cabin on the
mountain. With all the people who
clap when some mostly
vengeful violence happens in the scene,
those who do not clap may feel no other
people are not clapping. I hear you. It
seems reasonable to stare at a painting
for at least
as long as it takes the painter to make it
& also reasonable to stare for
approximately as long as it takes the
sun to rise & set. I told my father being
blessed was vaguely
more dependent on the whims of
God. I’d rather be lucky. The girl in
the well was put there in the name
of a god
created by farming people. The boy fell.
Published on Poets.org
The Kafka Virus vs (Thursday)
The madness of each ordinary day versus
the language of someone raised by history
versus someone raised by a virgin.
I’m mostly interested in the devil’s story,
because I know there’s some devil in me.
I still live like someone somewhere
will clean the vents of my home anatomy,
but I am the only one who lives here.
According to Memphis Slim what looks like singing
has its roots in slaves’ casting shade
on oppressors, a cotton feld of them stooped weeping
jeremiads of sweat. Marlon Brando’s snake
skin jacket in The Fugitive Kind cursed Marlon
Brando’s leather jacket in The Wild One
so that Brando himself became a black person
on opposite sides of a mirror calling each other Demon.
I am a man named your father’s name
or I am the heroin fower vendor
vending stolen fowers in the park. I am
Ambrose Black-Blake, The Butcher,
or Ebenezer Nebuchadnezzar, the Lying King.
Or a man who thinks winning is
the whole point of everything
while losing highlights loss.
to a nectar and poison
like moonshine that blinds the greedy,
each person may be given a beautiful second
chance, but it is the most tragic kind of beauty.
I am known, when entangled in
great and minor trouble, to berate
my own damn self. You fnd every kind
of human being human in every way every day.
If you are the only person to observe
a particular trait in yourself, how trustworthy is
the observation? People who have
been loved poorly may or may not be cursed
to love poorly. You know how you don’t know
how to describe your own face
without looking in the mirror? You know
how you never can tell a curse from a bad day?
That intermittent chirping coming
from somewhere in the house is a smoke
alarm’s dying battery not a canary. Growing
is never not a part of being grown. Most
big decisions are made without me and you
everyday too. I’m just so accustomed
to adjusting to everything. How often must I tell you
I was born to a 16-year-old black girl who had
three siblings with different fathers
in the projects of South Carolina in
1971, after a neighbor raped her?
If there is no solution
a problem is not a real problem by
defnition. When my mother’s grandmother
was alive,
she lived on the dark potions of a beautician
with a mouth full of hairpins,
and an enchanted freehand
above the minds of ladies looking
to feel more lovely beneath their lovers’ hands.
Like her ambidextrous
skinny silver scissors refning
the edges of her extra-large extra
magic touch, my hands are made for beautiful things.
Things Seen Right & Left Without Glasses
Sometimes I feel like a motherless town
Full of fathers who get custody of their sons
In the divorce, a town of hotels and campers
And men and boys who speak as strangers
But feel the blood they share.
I remember the policeman arrested the child
after hitting him so hard, his face caved
in the nightmare and the sound woke me.
My cry can be heard if you lay an ear
to my Adam’s apple, named so as proof
it was Adam who tried to swallow
where Eve only tried to bite the fruit.
Everything said and unsaid, issues from us
like a humming like honey clogging the pipes
with sweetness. Sometimes I feel like dancing.
We gonna dance the night away.
Sometimes I feel like somebody’s watching me.
Sometimes I feel like I got to run away.
Sometimes I feel like the child whose disfigured
expression was placed in a fishbowl.
Why would anyone ever truly want to relax?
Where I’m from everybody fights everybody
to get to truly know them. I plan to change
my mind according to intuition’s Venn diagram
with people who don’t know the truth
overlapping with people who know the truth but lie about it overlapping with
people
who don’t know the truth but think they do. We’re in the colorful gray between
up and down. Have mercy, I hear you say. It may not be right or wrong. It may
not be true or false.
Sometimes I feel like someone who parks with the headlights facing the road
Sometimes I feel like someone who parks with headlights facing the house.
Not so much the tongue as its negotiation with the throat and teeth. Not so much
a muscle as a space for mediating the bite and swallow. As if the spine is a
hollowed bony pole with teeth
around a throat attached to the gastrointestinal tract attached to the anus.
Sometimes I feel like Alice proves nothing’s wrong with a rabbit hole. There
must be a place to process what is taken in
and what is released. Throw your hands in the air and wave like you’re
changing a light bulb. Remember the first time you stayed up past midnight like
someone who was almost a know-it-all?
Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University.
Click here to discover more of Terrance’s work!
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