Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Like fishermen at dusk, the soldiers returned from war with stories slumped over their shoulders; their fingers firm at the knot, the netting, thick and tangled with the names of the dead. None could explain how the flood of life all around them escaped like water from between cupped hands, how the bodies of men they loved began to crust the earth like salt, how destruction danced slapdash and unashamed everywhere, and still they survived. When I came home from college proud, my educated mouth agape, a tackle box of words, slick and glossy and I saw the names of my friends, the young men I fought with, learned to drink with, and left behind Lil’Rocc, Pumpkin, Ulysses, Junebug, Aghoster names spray-painted throughout our neighborhood in memoriam, I couldn’t understand how a god could make one life possible and strip the world clean of so many, or how, like high-watermarks the dead remind the living of the coming of storms.

What did I know, what did I know Of gazing silences and terrored stone Brilliances; beauty of what’s hardbitten The auroral darkness which is God Then you arrived, meditative, ironic My head gripped in bony vice Mouth of agony shaping a cry it cannot utter What did I know, what did I know Of a changing permanence The stains and dirty tools of struggle Weaving a wish and a weariness together Years before your time. Years and years I gaze through layered light Within the rock of the undiscovered suns I see, I walk with you among The landscape lush, metallic, flayed Behind us, beyond us now The very sunlight here seems flammable

Watch the fire undress him, how flame fingers each button, rolls back his collar, unzips him without sweet talk or mystery. See how the skin begins to gather at his ankles, how it slips into the embers, how it shimmers beneath him, unshapen, iridescent as candlelight on a dark negligee. Come, look at him, at all his goods, how his whole body becomes song, an aria of light, a psalm’s kaleidoscope. Listen as he lets loose an opus, night’s national anthem, the tune you can’t name, but can’t stop humming. There, he burns brilliant as a blue note.

He promises a canary dress, white gloves, says they’ll eat chops, thick as her thighs, that they’ll order doubles of the “finest,” see all the Big Names when they arrive. But it’s the thought of them dead: half of what they own draped around them, her head against his chest, his back slack against the headboard, all their letters unopened, bills not paid, long knocks, the notices tacked outside their door. It’s not knowing whether some smell would introduce them to their neighbors or a landlord wheeling them out into the hallway; the highboy he chipped on the drive up, the silver she inherited from her mother, her hatboxes, stacked high next to them like a wedding cake waiting to be buried. He heard that “up there” the wind had talons sharp enough to hook a grown man beneath his collarbone and carry him a full city block. He heard that you learned the months by measuring the length of their shadows and even summer was like a quality of night.

we must know a force greater than our weaknesses —Jean Toomer like most boys, ignorant or fearful of beauty, we pinned back the wings of butterflies and plucked off their legs, and watched and watched them tumble from leaves like pinecones wheeling from rooftops; and we laughed. we crumbled alka-seltzer for the pigeons, “those flying rats” my mother’s ex-husband once called. their bodies floundering like toys flung from a window. white foam from their mouths stark against the asphalt framing their artless convulsions and we laughed with open-mouths until tears dripped from our chins and our throats were raw with the rightness of god.