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  • American Sonnet for Generic Carousel Music, and: American Sonnet for the Magic Carrots, and: American Sonnet & Golden Shovel for the Tree of Liberty
  • Terrance Hayes (bio)

AMERICAN SONNET FOR GENERIC CAROUSEL MUSIC

If I answer my father’s America you can guessAnything I tell you is a lie made of a few cansOf paint & theatrics set to loops of light & plasticA child is made to mount while the father snapsPictures & whistles softly to the carousel musicUnreeling above the ride from bullhorn speakersWired to a cassette tape the indifferent attendantTaped from an old record of carnival harmonicsOr produced with flutes & bells & whistles meldingNow with the sounds the father mimics as the childVanishes & appears bobbing in a circle on the backOf a bogus pony on a spear. When he was happy,Father whistled any tune he caught for us at dinner,But when he was sad, he hummed himself to sleep. [End Page 167]

AMERICAN SONNET FOR THE MAGIC CARROTS

If I answer my mother is America, you can guessShe fairs in the treatment of despair as a carouselUnicorn fairs at the fair, speared on a stripper poleBobbing in a circle with a child’s sticky grappleIn her hair & between her bulging eyes a hornThe shade of sunset or of those magic carrotsDangling from the farmer’s stand at the fairLike beaks torn from a few lopsided flamingos,Or perhaps torn from the avocet, a shorebirdWho sweeps shore mud for insects. If mother wasSad, she fed us carrots & potatoes, the table unset,But happy, she’d say, “If unicorn horns are boiledWith care they grow orange & meaty as carrots,”And sugar them in sparkles before they were blessed. [End Page 168]

AMERICAN SONNET & GOLDEN SHOVEL FOR THE TREE OF LIBERTY

Regarding my meditations & notes on theConstitution constituted by a genealogical treeOf white Christian merchants, of lawyers, ofMilitary men, of land & slave owners penning liberty(Not a true priest nor farmer, nor artist, nor must-Ache among them): the thing must naturally beIntended to maintain, sustain & occasionally refreshThe power (equal to freedom) of people like them withLittle thought about others. Will you go to war with the Appropriate weapon? Men armed with self-righteous bloodWill break you & laws very often. Make something ofYour suffering if you mean to survive it. Heroes & patriotsAre defined as those with a mind for sacrifice andA love for country when defined by fools & tyrants. [End Page 169]

Terrance Hayes

TERRANCE HAYES’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/ Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University.

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