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Callaloo 26.3 (2003) 692



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Grip

Jericho Brown


If, by the time you left, it had become a competition in which we,

like children at field day desperate
for the blue ribbon, pulled the twisted,
knotted hemp, gripping until certain
of calluses, if

our contest awarded the strongest, the man
who could best inflict pain
yet not flinch when injured, then

you won. I see this now
as I must imagine the brown spine of your back
to reach my own momentary peak
of isolation. Finally, you're not

a chain of yanks for first place, but
a series of slow strokes, not a gang of childish
grunts, but a thread of short breaths.

If, since you've gone, I have come
to accept the playground's mud in my eyes and mouth
left from your jerk and drag
over the line, if I wallow in the dirt,

splatter through muck
just as I now splash your relentless name
in shivers about me, if I make and taste

mud-pies, as real as they are bitter,
as bitter as they are

mine, then I win, and you love me.


 

Jericho Brown currently holds the C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship at the University of Houston, where he is a student in the PhD program in Creative Writing and Literature. He is a Cave Canem fellow, a member of NOMMO Literary Society, and has poems in Callaloo and Role Call. He is originally from New Orleans, LA.

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