Two Poems
Courtesy of Porch Drinking, Portland OR.
Field Notes
It happens when I’m sitting in a classroom
full of children who all look like each other,
but not like me.
It happens when I watch the pearly smile
appear on the pretty white woman who floats just above them,
her dress a buoy
they reach for
in failed fistfuls.
It happens as I hear them speak soliloquies
with words I have dared not touch,
or breathe on,
or get close enough to feel my nose hairs tingle
with their scent,
my tongue burn with strangeness—
but the good kind, you know—
the kind that spends its summers in Seattle,
sees its parents for ten minutes at dinner, nothing more,
but its loneliness leans into carefully cut-up cow bits,
has enough room
to lie with it bed,
& besides,
it forgets the next day.
This is what happens:
I feel myself shrink,
forget everything I’ve ever known,
& I want to say, but can’t,
There is something here that I have lost.
I Am Sitting in the Passenger Seat Looking at the Entire City of Portland
after Hanif Abdurraqib
& I see the one room apartment renters
the same as the cars on the St. John’s Bridge:
in clusters, illuminated, out of focus.
I’m saying it’s all blending together now—
the people are no longer people,
the cars no longer cars,
ourselves only solid in the shadows cast by city lights,
another man is wailing against a building in the dark
without a home or a head, it seems
& I’m saying I don’t even know what he’s saying now,
his syllables aren’t syllables anymore,
a high-pitched screech of sound,
but everybody walks by untouched
& he doesn’t seem to notice either
I’m saying it’s all blending together now—
his cries & the sound of falling in love
with only part of a city,
the side that didn’t raise us.
Alabama Shakes’ “Gimme All Your Love” rides in the passenger seat,
but the loneliness is heavier now,
& I know oh I know nothing is the same as when I was a child here,
seeing it for the first time, the lights the only thing I wanted to take with me,
swallow whole and see colors the same as faces brushing past on a street corner,
& what I mean is that
I’m wondering when we’ll stop choosing to see
the corners of this city,
telling ourselves
this is where we’re from.