Plantation by Charif Shanahan

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend December 1, 2016   Plantation   Charif Shanahan

When he finally brought the hammer down One half-inch from my mother's face   The hole in the wall Wide as a silver dollar   I was close enough Huddled there   In the folds of her lap Her arms wet with sweat and crossed   Against my back And since from the room   All sound had gone I was clear enough to see   Inside the cracked plaster: A river delta, fractured,   Branching off and becoming The sea. . . Or, a tiny moon   On a shore of white sand, The tide lapping it in foam and tugging—No,   Twelve dead presidents perched there Each with the face of my father—   Tight-lipped, vacant-eyed— Scanning the field for a body to mark   Then locking in on her knee-bent dread— Ordinary, mammary—   A yellow suckling heavy on her tit. . . No, I think it was her one good eye   Refusing to blink, Scaling the bare-white wall   At the core of the mind (not measuring its height)   Then circling a waterless well In a desert without sand,   Unnumbered sisters before her Caught in the belly of the boats—   Where there was too much sound to hear, Though only one voice, one cry—   Their dark arms like trellised vines Crossed and reaching.            Copyright © 2016 Charif Shanahan. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "When I started writing this poem, I fell quickly—from the scene of domestic violence that occasioned it—into history. The center of the poem became the hammer's impression in the wall—history's imprint on the present, or a kind of portal between the two, a membrane so thin, at times, as to appear invisible, or nonexistent altogether. The poem also performs the speaker's own negotiations with the histories implicated by this one portion of his family story: How do we identify trauma in a language that is true and complete enough to contain it? How do we reconcile a trauma that is ancient, that was already here waiting for us?" —Charif Shanahan   Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.   Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Poetry by Shanahan   Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017)    "From the Peninsula" by Ishion Hutchinson "The Sky Over My Mother's House" by Jaime Manrique "Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath" by Natasha Trethewey Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

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