Object Permanence, and: Legendary (1)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Object Permanence*, and: Legendary (1)*
OBJECT PERMANENCE*
We wake as if surprised the other is still there,each petting the sheet to be sure.
How have we managed our wayto this bed—beholden to heat like dawn
indebted to light. Though we’re not so self-important as to think everything
has led to this, everything has led to this.There’s a name for the animal
love makes of us—named, I think,like rain, for the sound it makes.
You are the animal after whom other animalsare named. Until there’s none left to laugh,
days will start with the same startleand end with caterpillars gorged on milkweed.
O, how we entertain the angelswith our brief animation. O,
how I’ll miss you when we’re dead. [End Page 319]
LEGENDARY (1)*
I’d like to be a spoiled rich white girl. —Venus Xtravaganza
I want to be married in church. In white.Nothing borrowed or blue. I want a whitehouse in Peekskill, far from the city—whitepicket fence fencing in my lily-whitelilies. O, were I whiter than white.A couple kids: one girl, one boy. Both white.Birthright. All the amenities of white:golf courses, guesthouses, garage with whitewasher/dryer set. Whatever else whiteaffords, I want. In multiples of white.Two of nothing is something, if they’re white.Never mind another neutral. Off-whitewon’t do. Capeesh? I want to be whiteas the unsparing light at tunnel’s end. [End Page 320]
NICOLE SEALEY, born in St. Thomas (USVI) and reared in central Florida, is Programs Director of the Cave Canem Foundation. She is author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, which won the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has also published poems in Ploughshares, Third Coast, Copper Nickel, Harvard Review, Best New Poets, and Callaloo. Her poetry has also garnered for her such honors, prizes, and grants as the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a CantoMundo, the Poetry International Prize, and others.
Footnotes
* for John. Originally published in American Poetry Review 44.2 (2015).
* Venus Xtravaganza was an Italian American transgender performer featured in Paris Is Burning, a documentary film about drag pageants in 1980s Harlem. “Legendary (1)” was originally published in Tupelo Quarterly 1.4.
