Back to Issue Thirty-Five

THE WEATHERMAN GETS TO CURSE IN CHICAGO

BY KYLE DARGAN

After Godfrey and Yeats

 

Accounting for your particular red pixel

pinned on the zoomable map—your precise

crucifix of latitude / longitude—

profanity may be the most incisive means

of discussing today’s clouds and what wet remittance 

they have hauled upon your head. 

Every footprint is an exit on the ever-

blazing jet streams. Any footprint is now a potential 

fuck! when freights of drought or heat-voided 

air sail into all our weather systems’ ports.

Aren’t you tired of hearing about Chicago

and its taloned wind, its L rails set aflame

to stem frostbite in the track switches’ toes,

wings, and noses? Let’s take a poll. Raise

your middle finger if lately you too have lifted

an expletive to the sky—a kite-curse to glide its way 

around the globe and back to the peoples

whose industries fabricated the blizzard you must dig free from 

or the flooding from which you will not,

or the calor which smiles as it strangles you.

The globe is gifting us all an opportunity to become climate 

masochists, to smugly shit! and goddamn!

our way towards feeling superior in our intemperate suffering.

If, in the end, our one hand cannot halt

our other hand—as it extends its thumb, hitching us towards terrestrial dismissal— 

then, at the least, we all should enjoy

the privilege of calling the wind everything but a child of god, 

of smirking while we scoff at the idea

that the weather could possibly hate someone somewhere 

more than its gyre does seethe for you, or you.

 

 

TO THE BLK BOY WEARING A MAGA HAT IN OLNEY, MARYLAND

or

WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME, MY 2020 PREDICTION IS THAT MORE BLK MEN WILL VOTE FOR PRES. TRUMP

BY KYLE DARGAN

An other is anyone who is not me. Anyone who is not me is like me in some ways and unlike me in other ways.
~Harryette Mullen

 

I do not know if Kanye West is any more real

than John Henry. I know their stories,

you know, but my eyes have never seen either

the way my eyes have seen you pedaling down far Georgia

Avenue—weaving in and out of your bicycle-boy triad,

joshing with your blond peers. I do not need you

to be a racial figment. By all means, be.

Blkness I know better than to see as a oneness.

Nor do I believe in Oreos and Negroes and Coons and African-

Americans. Blk people are not candy

—we do not come in such simple flavors. In years past,

I’d drive my father through waveform Appalachian topography—

not merely where nothing is urban, but those weakly molested

swaths of this country that favor empty Edward Hopper

landscapes. Look at all this (my father gestured with a pause

I thought reverent). Can you believe they stole all of this?

—(him thinking stolen from us) him thinking through his cis-

het brotha lens, and I thought yeah, I am

			 sure the indigenous’ minds cannot escape

such belief. Such blk men, at times, we have this pinching manner

of seeing ourselves as America’s most gruesome and primary

plunder—us lashed us Plessy’d us Tulsa’d us share

crop’d us King’d us red-lined us white

flight’d us King Crack’d us three-strike’d . . . 	us Michael

			 Jackson’d us gentrified us Cosby’d—

	our minds wounded to the point of weaving

	unlike threads into a continuum noose

		that ever scarves our necks.

I do recognize the urge to wear something unfamiliar

above your shoulders—being accessorized in a style that does not feel as if

your spine is being snapped. No brothas own these red caps 

in my family, yet they do talk about Latinx immigrants “taking”

construction work the same way they used to talk about crack

taking their dignity or blk women “taking” jobs or white men 

“taking” blk women. I wonder,

	young brotha (who is not my brother, just something that blk men say),

how bone-close did you have to cut to graft yourself 			in this winning.

Those others, those born not brothas—who find no safe theatre to costume in

and wear plainly the crosshaired blue lesions of their American realities

—after this current remaking of greatness is rested,

			your others will remember, will recognize still,

	your face 	once this red and white folly is cast off

and—like a chronic exhibit—returned to the climate-

controlled archives of the next four more hundred years.


Kyle Dargan is the author of five collections of poetry: The Listening (2004), which won the Cave Canem Prize, Bouquet of Hungers (2007), awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry, Logorrhea Dementia (2010), Honest Engine (2015), and Anagnorisis (2019), longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His poems and non-fiction have appeared in newspapers such as the Newark Star-Ledger, and journals such as Callaloo, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares, among others. In 2019, he received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Dargan is also the founding editor of the magazine Post No Ills. He is the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at American University.

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