where fun comes to die

Maroons like to run naked.
Every winter, a squadron of nerds disrobes
to jog bare buttocks through Hyde Park snow, showing off
their pale pimpled backs, pink with sweat and February
frost, glossed with the jittery intent of a Boston native
majoring in Arabic, prep school prom queens burning
off the tension of cramming OChem. Past the Bartlett quad,

across University Avenue, dazzling sleepy studiers dragging
themselves to the Regenstein A-level with their flapping
breasts and astoundingly white asses. Finals week, another

platoon of nude runners whoops through the library, slowly
enough to notice that still, no one is hot enough to justify
wasting your Blackberry’s photo memory, quickly enough

that it might have just been a mirage induced by Aderol
and espresso and reading that same sentence from Discipline
and Punish for the eighteenth straight time. This is the place

where fun comes to die. It’s a concentration camp for fun,
an awkward first-year might say, and wait for a laugh.

In Southern Sudan, one tribe commonly names their sons
for the historical events during which they were born.
There are many sons of Sudan named Domaac,
bullet.

Days before the 2007 Polar Bear Run, the University
of Chicago President released a statement explaining
why the institution would not divest from Sudan,
but would start a $200,000 fund toward scholarly works
studying the effect of corporate divestment from genocidal conflicts.

Days after the 2010 Polar Bear Run, the University
Police brutalized and arrested a Black undergrad
on the A-Level of the Regenstein Library for trespassing.

A child too weak to walk another hundred miles
is easy prey for lions.

Twenty-six thousand bird-ribbed boys march
away orphans. They know the forest better
than the northern militia; their sisters
are no longer virgins, their mothers have been stoned.

When the Ethiopian tanks chase them to the River Gilo
thousands die in the spray of bullets, thousands more
in the jaws of crocodiles, others simply drown, feathering
the surface current with their hollow bodies like browning leaves.

The rest run naked toward Kenya, bullets whizzing at their backs,
the whir of mosquitoes prickling their wounds. This is where

fun comes to die, where children dig each other’s graves.
This is a concentration camp for fun, where dorm-debutants
run naked except for gloved hands, where a lost boy’s hands
flap away from the machete, where chemists who row crew
jog through Chicago slush wearing only Crocs, where crocs snap

the naked heels of boys who run like bullets.

how to stop mourning

::: the poet plays her favorite line

I would have a typewriter, an oil lamp,
stone pockets. I keep telling men I’m a myth.

I would have a river, an oven, a stake. I keep
switching shoes before dinner, to be taller, to elevate

on the pads of my feet into a kiss that names
me goddess, no matter how ugly I try to convince

him I am. I make myself a metonym, make eyes
like my mouth aches to be used, make eggs scrambled.

I scrape my wrists with car keys before leaving
for work in the morning, after I pray. I am coding

and selfish. I sleep topless and pretend chastity;
I would temper shields, weave chainmail, honey

the instruments of men who build things they don’t love
as much as me. I would drink chloroform, bundle

the manuscript with twine and leave it in the bottom
drawer of my uncle’s hard pine desk.

I would leave you.
I would unlearn the song remorse.

never mind

::: the poet discovers she can still discover

The spider is a miracle,
grotesque and serene, squatting
in the courtyard shadows. He promises
nothing, not to keep secrets murmured
at the gate, pleadings sputtered into the intercom,
not even a bounty of trapped mosquitoes, no. He twists
and weaves and waves a few legs at the prospect
of a fallen twig.

The poet thanks him for expecting
nothing of her, for a web that withstands
rain, for the curious spotted pouch
of his belly when it’s all she can do
to not trip over her own tears
all the way to the second floor.

The spider won’t lie for her.
She’d never ask him to.
We’re not naïve enough to say
it can’t speak.

a monday skirting death
::: the poet reconsiders

the fluted bones of a seagull
throttle a cold breeze over
some ocean somewhere, bending
to accept the swell of sky despite
the pain slashing the filament
of feathers on the rise

horizon swims backward away
from the bird, curving into its own lip
like two lover gods locked in the genesis
of kissing. lightning crackles on the goose-
flesh of a bulbous cloud, in the dark, over an ocean,
somewhere. and no one is around to witness

the poet is a fleck, anguishing in the midwest,
convulsing in the corners of her used couch,
averting the glint and wink of the cutlery
each time she passes the kitchen. the moon
aches over the courtyard of her yellow apartment
building, as if to mock her melodrama, as if to say

i am too busy lifting the gulls into my night

there are too many poison frogs in brazil, too many
mangoes rotting on curbs in the caribbean. a glut
of stars crowding the cosmos, concertas trembling forth
from the hands of librettists. the poet envies the gull,

its fortitude for flight, its quiet expansion on the skin
of everything.

::: the poet plays apotheosis

I’m leaving the noose there
for now, two belts looped through
each other’s eyes, one end taut
around the tension rod he gave me
for the closet, the other a leather ring
to thread my head through, the scent of hide
dizzying and warm before kneeling.
Maybe so when it comes, I won’t have to fumble
over the stiff grooves of its cracked surface,
fingers growing numb, slick and viscous
in the mess of my insurance cuts. Perhaps
just to remind me how dangerous I can be,
to call the number someone gave me, take
my vitamins.

I’ve done this before. I know my body
must become a cistern, scraped raw
inside, a paste of crushed bone
and black capillaries flung over the railing
of the back porch, carved out like pumpkin rot. I know
when I manage to not destroy myself I become a god
marveling at how white her palms in the moonlight.

Who ever even heard of blood

But on Saturday afternoon I’m a smudgefaced girl
practicing her curtsy with a belt tightening at the base
of her skull, wondering how many minutes it takes, who
will be the first to try opening the front door, how the front door
will jam against the cold weight of her kneeling corpse, how enough
letters have been sent, no more necessary for this specific occasion,
who will scream and who will shrug and who will blame him.

And so I rock back on my heels and stand up, letting the belts
flap back into the closet like a child, waving
from his hiding place in this very fun game.