At nights birds hammered my unborn
child's heart to strength, each strike bringing
...
A furnace in my father's voice; I prayed for the coal stove's
roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle
...
Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary corners
of second life the hospital light ravened solstice
...
Lesson of the day: Syria and Styria.
For Syria, read: His conquering banner shook from Syria.
And for Styria: Look at this harp of blood, mapping.
...
The old trees shake out medals at midday
to the ship paused for a meteor's blunting
glimpse in the windy yellow of the water,
...
They are back, the miniature
explosion of florets, cut away
just days before by the mower.
...
Ground-levelled, behind a line drawn,
he took aim at a circle of precious marbles,
precise, interrupting the passaging ants,
the shot was fired, and if they had known,
...
Late April rain fogs the Wasatch
and turns its wrought peaks steel;
a lightning crack draws a photograph
...
A calm sign in the trees of May: she's dead,
not like this dirge staining the air, her name
recited in the camphor-house where the chalk
figurine, that haberdashery sphinx reclines,
...
My first snow, I open the pages
of Montale, the scent of iron
and light coming out of heads
...
I took my name from the aftersky
of a Mesopotamian flood,
birdless as if culture had shed its wings
...
The train station was a cemetery.
Drunk with spirits, another being entered.
I fanned gnats from my eyes to see into his face.
...
The genie says build a studio. I build
a studio from ash. I make it out of peril and slum
things. I alone when blood and bullet and all
Christ-fucking-‘Merican-dollar politicians talk
...
The choir that cannot die.
Fish and fennel. Snow. Christmas
tree, clover and pomegranate.
...
A soft light, God's idleness
warms the skin of the lake.
Impeachable, mind-changing
light in the mind of the leaves.
...
I walk the midnight her voice
storm off the island into the house,
the cupboards and closets,
...
The houses are shut, the neighbors gone
to the burning field at the mangrove's edge,
where the heatstroke anthropologist writes
...
Amid ice and granite
sea hush and crash
and the profit and the loss
the prophet xeroxed
in his tamarind shade
and wasp buzz and saw
in the hills crashed leaves
and virgins' suicides
right after the election
and November's Janus
and Pontius Pilate's
maggot snipers' amen
and fortunately I forgot
to be afraid and kept
my fear in the salt
chiseling my face
when I read Keats
and loved the ash
and put two coins
in my right palm
amid the crashed crop
century of wheat
drought rosary terra
cotta Kali reconnaissance
renaissanced my nipples
torpedoed and rocked
the strobe-lit stageshow
the Gorgon's scintillated
romance foiled the constable's
peace and Herodotus
slept as the prophet rose
to his chalice and put
on his mongrel pelt
and it rained softly
and blessed nothing
scarce of breath
and grated nutmeg
and the tyranny of sugar
and pure cream soda
enclosed in cinders
shook burst fizzed
and I found my shape
shifted ciphered raw
my total reversal
my total reversal
my total reversal
...
After the hurricane walks a silence, deranged, white as the white helmets
of government surveyors looking into roofless
shacks, accessing stunned fowls, noting inquiries
into the logic of feathers, reversed, like gullies still retching; they scribble facts
about fallen cedars, spread out like dead generals on leaf
medallions; they draw tables to show the shore
has rearranged its idea of beauty for the resort
villas, miraculously not rattled by the hurricane's -
call it Cyclops - passage through the lives
of children and pigs, the one eye that unhooked
banjos from the hills, smashed them in Rio Valley;
they record how it howled off to that dark parish
St. Thomas, stomping drunk with wire lashes and cramps,
paralyzing electric poles and coconut trees,
dishing discord among neighbours, exposed,
standing among their flattened, scattered lives for the first time.
It passed through Aunt May's head, upsetting
the furniture, left her chattering something,
a cross between a fowl and a child; they can't say
how it tore down her senses, no words, packing
their instruments, flies returning to genuflect
at their knees, on Aunt May's face, gone soft;
no words, except: Don't fret, driving off,
as if they had left better promises to come.
...
History is dismantled music; slant,
bleak on gravel. One amasses silence,
another chastises silence with nettles,
stinging ferns. I oscillate in their jaws.
The whole gut listens. The ear winces
white nights in his talons: sinking mire.
He wails and a comet impales the sky
with the duel wink of a wasp's burning.
Music dismantles history; the flambeaux
inflame in his eyes with a locust plague,
a rough gauze bolting up his mouth unfolds,
so he lashes the air with ropes and roots
that converge on a dreadful zero,
a Golden Age. Somewhere, an old film.
Dusk solders on a cold, barren coast. There
I am a cenotaph of horns and stones.
...
Ishion Hutchinson is an award-winning Jamaican poet and essayist. Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He received a BA from the University of the West Indies, an MFA from New York University, and a PhD from the University of Utah. His poetry and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Review (UK), Narrative, New Letters, Granta, Gulf Coast, The Huffington Post, The Wolf (UK), Prairie Schooner, Attica, Caribbean Review of Books, and the LA Review. His first collection, Far District, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK), won the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Hutchinson is also the recipient of the 2013 Whiting Award and the 2011 Academy of American Poets' Larry Levis Prize. He currently teaches courses in poetry and creative writing at Cornell University and serves as contributing editor to the literary journal, Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.)
At nights birds hammered my unborn
At nights birds hammered my unborn
child's heart to strength, each strike bringing
bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone
among women who cursed their hearts
out, soured themselves, never-brides,
into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened
their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.
Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled
from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken
asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;
shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulb
and light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a poui
tree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.