Trash
Happy birthday, Al Roker is how every August 20th call opens
between me & Devin for a decade, shifting only once we are old
enough for mortgages, knee pain, the same blue joke about being
here at all: black men past 25 with a harrowing percentage of brothers
we chased in childhood now in chains, graves, instead of here with us,
on the phone, or else in some gentrified bar growing old over bourbon.
I can no longer recall how the ritual was built. Something to do with
my relationship to meteorology, perhaps, as it holds many things I adore
within its frame, and feels much more like the prophecy of old than anything
you see on TV these days, unless you watch the sort of shows that Grandma
did, before she went the way of everything too beautiful for permanence.
Al Roker is a weatherman. He conveys in human speech what we cannot
pull from the sky’s great gray drama. The tropical storm is over his shoulder
now, spinning, harmless only at this level of abstraction. I change into the rain
-coat that matches my favorite hat. In poems, I grow immortal. Time
gathers in my hair like a silver city seen at a distance.
Notes:
Audio version performed by the author.
Source:
Poetry
(January 2023)
