Poem of the Week: Aracelis Girmay

Break

When the boys are carnivals

we gather round them in the dark room

& they make their noise while drums

ricochet against their bodies & thin air

below the white ceiling hung up like a moon

& it is California, the desert. I am driving in a car,

clapping my hands for the beautiful windmills,

one of whom is my brother, spinning,

on a hillside in the garage

with other boys he'll grow old with, throw back.

How they throw back their bodies

on the cardboard floor, then spring-to, flying

like the heads of hammers hitting strings

inside of a piano.

     Again, again.

This is how they fall & get back up. One

who was thrown out by his father. One

who carries death with him like a balloon

tied to his wrist. One whose heart will break.

One whose grandmother will forget his name.

One whose eye will close. One who stood

beside his mother's body in a green hospital. One.

Kick up against the air to touch the earth.

See him fall, then get back up.

Then get back up.

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From The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015). Used with permission. Photo by Sheila Griffin.

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Aracelis Girmay is the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing, and the poetry collections Teeth and Kingdom Animalia. Girmay is on the faculty of Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Drew University's low-residency MFA program. For the past few years, she has been studying texts and other materials that, through form, language(s), diction, and gesture, perform and think about place and loss of place (or displacement), and what this sometimes has to do with the sea.

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