FASCISM
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I have friends that know things, and that’s why
they’re my friends ― the types to twerk in church, street-smart clairvoyants who make fools aware of their foolishness ― and so I turn to them in the darkest hours because they are dark and have somehow survived long enough to tell me where it hurts. And where isn’t as important a question to ask as when, and when isn’t a question that needs asking because, with the eyes behind my eyes, I can tease out the swell beneath any kind of bruise, can always find the color red running toward trauma. A long time ago, a willow of a woman told me why the caged bird sings, but nobody ever told me why people insist on putting themselves in cages, which is distinct from putting other people in cages, which truly goes without saying and has gone so for so long and hence here we are: body wine washing over the stones of our knuckles, sweeping the glass up off the floor. I, too, have a theory about broken windows I wish to submit to the Academy, but I heard it was burned to the ground last night; all the things I don’t know could fill a book, but all the things I do know could get me killed, though I worry most about the people who taught them to me, their pictures thumb- tacked to the wall of a smoke-filled room, faces freckled by holes made by dart after dart after dart after dart after dart. |
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Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. In 2017, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His work has appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, River Styx, and elsewhere.