"If I Am Alive To" by Charif Shanahan

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 24, 2018   If I Am Alive To   Charif Shanahan

A second death in as many days and I succeed at being Strong and contained, until the tweet Where one young brother says I'm not scared of dying, I'm scared of breaking my mother's heart. I am flesh Two rooms down the hall from my mother's flesh Holding in my hands the news which is not new and today, at last,           I understand How primal and intelligent her need To be done with this— Our sorrow, our joy, anything at all thought ours— To be done with the almost unavoidable assertion Of a self she refused To let her body take on—and to be done Permanently, by making A useful choice, through a man made useful by her choosing, A man of Irish-Scandinavian stock (the only criteria, I have wondered, in angrier moments), so that Her boys, my brothers and I, or at least our bodies Emerged from hers looking Spanish, maybe Greek or Italian. Three boys, each passing Closer to her one True North. When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying           I love you. She is saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother           she wished He'd just find a nice blonde girl and settle down, I took her by the face And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance, Told her I love you and you are crazy. Today I see: I am flesh, I am free To inhabit my life: to stand, to sit, to breathe, to play tag Or with a toy gun, to walk away, or to run, to put my hands up, to           ask why. Today on a walk I took to release How it felt to be shut out—this time, By the editor of the African diasporic journal Who asked not me but someone who didn't know me Was I Black— I cross 112th and Amsterdam and suddenly Am 20 years-old again, Drunk, out-of-control in pain without knowing Why, trying to jump a taxi Because I'd spent my money on booze, and the cop Whose car pulled into the crosswalk to block me, To stop me as I ran, gets out and says to me If you don't pay the man, I'll arrest you. I was underage. I jumped a taxi. I was incoherent and angry. I did not have the money to pay the man. I was not arrested. Turning from the news, I complain now to a friend I don't know why we (all of us) should want to live— It's all so futile and banal. It's all so pointless, even when it's good— As my mother rests inside her safe and dusty room Next to the man she crossed an ocean to find. I have thought her wrong To think that we would need saving. But what do I know Of having to choose one violence over another? Asleep now She rests inside her flesh, my father close beside her On his back, his forearm across his eyes, He who chose her, too, And over his own family, he knew to tell us, having learned early That you must cross whatever line you have to cross.                Copyright © 2018 Charif Shanahan. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "This poem considers the ways in which we save and wound one another—sometimes at the same time—and the deeply personal choices we might feel we need to make in the face of global injustice, inequity, and hatred. Formally, the poem performs a thinking through of deep, constitutive emotion, a kind of confrontation of the analytical and emotional minds. It is also a love poem to my heroic and exquisite mother." —Charif Shanahan   Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and for the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. A Wallace Stegner Fellow, he was recently named a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. Originally from the Bronx, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.   Photo credit: Justin Hoch Poetry by Shanahan   Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017) "The World Seems…" by Gregory Orr "Poem Full of Worry Ending with My Birth" by Tarfia Faizullah "part ii: our obsessions are obsessions, excerpt from Instruction Manual for Little Beasts" by Tessa Micaela May Guest Editor: Matthew Shenoda   Thanks to Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Shenoda and our guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! 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