Jamaal May

Spout of a leaf, listen out for the screams of your relentless audience: the applause of a waterfall in the distance, a hurricane looting a Miami shopping mall. How careful you are with the rain-cradling curve of your back. Near your forest, all are ready to swim and happy to drown in me: this lake of fire that moats the edges. From my mouth, they come to peel the flames and drink their slick throats into the most silent of ashes.

For Detroit There are birds here, so many birds here is what I was trying to say when they said those birds were metaphors for what is trapped between buildings and buildings. No. The birds are here to root around for bread the girl’s hands tear and toss like confetti. No, I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton, I said confetti, and no not the confetti a tank can make of a building. I mean the confetti a boy can’t stop smiling about and no his smile isn’t much like a skeleton at all. And no his neighborhood is not like a war zone. I am trying to say his neighborhood is as tattered and feathered as anything else, as shadow pierced by sun and light parted by shadow-dance as anything else, but they won’t stop saying how lovely the ruins, how ruined the lovely children must be in that birdless city.

Acting on an anonymous tip, a shift supervisor at a runaway shelter strip-searched six teenagers. Mrs. Haver was taping shut the mouths of talkative students by the time she neared retirement, and Mr. Vickers, a skilled electrician in his day, didn’t adapt when fuses became circuit breakers, a fact that didn’t stop him from tinkering in our basement until the house was consumed by flame. I used to want to be this bad at a job. I wanted to show up pissy drunk to staff meetings when the power point slides were already dissolving one into another, but I had this bad habit of showing up on time and more sober than any man should be when working audio/visual hospitality in a three star hotel that was a four star hotel before he started working there. When the entire North Atlantic blacked out, every soul in the Hyatt Regency Dearborn flooded the parking lot panicked about terrorists and rapture, while I plugged in microphones and taped down cables by flashlight—you know, in case whatever cataclysm unfolded didn’t preempt the meetings. Meetings, before which I’d convince a children’s hospital to pay fifteen dollars to rent a nine dollar laser pointer. Thirty-five bucks for a flip chart, extra paper on the house. Is it good to be good at a job if that job involves pretending to be a secret service agent for Phizer’s George Bush impersonator? I don’t know if it’s better to be good at a bad job or bad at a good job, but there must be some kind of satisfaction in doing a job so poorly, you’re never asked to do it again. I’m not saying he’s a hero, but there’s a guy out there who overloaded a transformer and made a difference, because in a moment, sweating through my suit, groping in the dark when my boss was already home, I learned that I’d work any job this hard, ache like this to know that I could always ache for something. There’s a hell for people like me where we shovel the coal we have mined ourselves into furnaces that burn the flesh from our bones nightly, and we never miss a shift.

A lot of it lives in the trachea, you know. But not so much that you won’t need more muscle: the diaphragm, a fist clenching at the bottom. Inhale. So many of us are breathless, you know, like me kneeling to collect the pottery shards of a house plant my elbow has nudged into oblivion. What if I sigh, and the black earth beneath me scatters like insects running from my breath? Am I a god then? Am I insane because I worry about the disassembling of earth regularly? I walk more softly now into gardens or up the steps of old houses with impatiens stuffed in their window boxes. When it’s you standing there with a letter or voice or face full of solemn news, will you hold your breath before you knock?

(through smoke) My mother became an ornithologist when the grackle tumbled through barbecue smoke and fell at her feet. Soon she learned why singers cage birds; it can take weeks to memorize a melody — the first days lost as they mope and warble a friendless note, the same tone every animal memorizes hours into breathing. It’s a note a cologne would emit if the bottle was struck while something mystical was aligned with something even more mystical but farther away. My father was an astronomer for forty minutes in a row the first time a bus took us so far from streetlights he could point out constellations that may or may not have been Draco, Orion, Aquila, or Crux. When they faded I resented the sun’s excess, a combination of fires I couldn’t smell. The first chemist was a perfumer whose combinations, brushed against pulse points, were unlocked by quickening blood. From stolen perfumes I concocted my personal toxin. It was no more deadly than as much water to any creature the size of a roach. I grew suspicious of my plate and lighter Bunsen burner, the tiny vials accumulating in my closet. I was a chemist for months before I learned the difference between poisoned and drowned. When my bed caught fire it smelled like a garden.

It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so of the next closest thing to water to the touch, or it could just as easily be a shaft of  wood crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm. But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure of this town, it is the flash that arrives and leaves at nearly the same moment. It’s what I want to be in this moment, in this doorway, because much as I’d love to be the silk-shimmer against the curve of anyone’s arm, as brutal and impeccable as it’d be to soar from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing compared to that moment when I eat the dark, draw shadows in quick strokes across wall and start a tongue counting down to thunder. That counting that says, I am this far. I am this close.