The Most Opaque Sands Make for the Cleanest Glass, and: Origin, and: At L’Express French Bistro My White Father Kisses My Black Mother Then Calls the Waiter a Nigger, and: Eunuch
Rent from DeepDyve- The Most Opaque Sands Make for the Cleanest Glass, and: Origin, and: At L’Express French Bistro My White Father Kisses My Black Mother Then Calls the Waiter a Nigger, and: Eunuch
The Most Opaque Sands Make for the Cleanest Glass
The dark matterTurned its face to mine
And I could feel its breathing, the invisiblePull between the invisible
Air and my half-lit face, hungryAnd waiting. I felt it
Reaching for me, the sorrow-down slipOf its call, its smoke tongue
Licking behind my ears, my hairErect with kinesis. I felt it
Settle on and around the table,A slow turning: a cold tail. How
Can she sit there and say Child,I am not, we are not—
In spite of—no inside ofThe dark fact of her body? [End Page 113]
Origin
That evening, while the pasta boiled,the man said to the woman
“Let them be white …” And as though the earthrumbled and shook—or rather grew
from inside a slate of nothing,three gold-skinned balls spun into the air
and broke open: many years later,when my arms and legs turned solid and cold,
my throat a canal, my whole body a bridge,the saltwater stilled and darkened:
the man and the woman, turning off the stove,poured wine into goblets marked by X’s
and slow danced, the decision made.In the cloudy glass now I imagine I see
empty hands filling themselves with other hands,letters I can almost decipher—yes,
tell me I belong here divinginto my own center: my own self
an unknowable reef— [End Page 114]
At L’Express French Bistro My White Father Kisses My Black Mother Then Calls the Waiter a Nigger
I change the subject and askHow longHe thinks he’ll run.He says, Son, I am completeTo the bone. I say, You’re evading my question.
He says, How’s the job?Mom says, Tell me how you feel.These days, I mutter, black. Quite black. Pass the cream.He says, What do you mean?
Mom says to the waiter, Bien cuit,S’il vous plaît, smiling. I say,He doesn’t speak French. Mom says, On parleLe français au Maroc. I say,Yes, Mom, in Senegal too. [End Page 115]
Eunuch
i
behind the village wall his wrists tiedwith rope staked into sand his voice has no bodyhis loincloth balled up and flushagainst the perineum warm copperhammered thin and sharpcircles him there his smoothest fleshif not early morning it is exactly noonhis eyes roll back into frenzied lids before the rip into him and the great woundcovered in sweet wood ash and at lastthe long sleep while dogs eat the blood-meatdiscarded beside the well and his waking in air cooled by nightto stand squinting through low fogat a woman being swallowed by a snake
ii
By day three, waist deep in clay, he is ready, if still breathing, to accept
the hot needle, probing the lost urethra, his body then put back
into clay. By month six, the surface is a gnarl of skin, discolored, [End Page 116]
a quilt of yellow moons. A shadow of hunger, as a hand removed
from dirt remembers how it felt to be submerged,
to enter another warmth and then to be without— [End Page 117]
Charif Shanahan has studied poetry at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and, most recently, New York University, where he earned his mfa as a Starlight Foundation Fellow. The recipient of the 2010 Academy of American Poets University Prize and a semi-finalist for the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, his poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Republic, Barrow Street, A Public Space, Circumference, Manhattanville Review, and elsewhere. He work as the programs director for the Poetry Society of America and as the poetry editor for Psychology Tomorrow magazine.
