Poetry Friday: Look closely

In honor of National Poetry Month, The Thread is celebrating Poetry Fridays. Each Friday in April, we will publish a selection of poetry from local independent publishing houses Coffee House Press, Graywolf Press and Milkweed Editions.

Today's selections come from Fady Joudah, Justin Phillip Reed and Tarfia Faizullah.

Footnotes to a Song

Echo has no compass: we trace each other's dermatomes
No ecstasy without betrayal: not all who live in flames are saints
Great art needs no nation: in memory country size is one
Great nations need great art: soliloquy a mother tongue
The surface tension of a Jesus bug: opiates me
We reach a cemetery: to each a cemetery
What is seen ends: even if its ending isn't seen
Tethered to a trope: great nations need great despair
Great despair: needs nary a nation
My grief for a grievance: we're radiocarbon
Your grief for a grievance: we're mitochondriacs

"Footnotes to a Song" from "Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance." Copyright © 2018 by Fady Joudah. Used with the permission of Milkweed Editions.

A Statement from No One, Incorporated

"what is it when a death is ruled a homicide but no one is responsible for it" —Hanif Abdurraqib

We are not responsible. We have not
the capacity to respond, cannot take
your call, are not obliged. We promise
nothing in return except that we will
return, asking that the potential profit
this lost life's labor could have produced
be accounted for, and blaming our
Black dead president for the deficit. We
are deficient and without your damage
the world is difficult work to live on.
We live on the unanswerable, assert
that acknowledgment is inartistic,
history is regressive, and aggression
looks like no one we know. No one
is responsible while we have the luxury
to see ourselves as infinite ones, ocean
of individual possibility. We are so
many blades in the yard the wind
runs screaming invisibly through.
We need to have a deeper dialogue
about the need for deeper dialogue,
but oh oh, we are always these spondees
of speechlessness and cannot process
your request, are too busy about
our dreams. The celestial bodies appear
from here, ripe for colonies and more
questions. We are over earthly inquiry
and unfortunately, though your sigh
traveled light-years from the dark
matter of gravity we're intrigued to find
you now are, we will not see you today
(we are recessed on narrowing beaches,
toasting our gods with a wellsprung red
we cannot source but are confident
the year was relatively good), but here,
for your trouble, for coming so far:


"A Statement from No One, Incorporated" from "Indecency." Copyright © 2018 by Justin Phillip Reed. Used with the permission of Coffee House Press.

West Texas Nocturne

Because the sky burned, I had to unhinge
from the window the mesh screen
to step out onto the roof where the world was
an orange freshly peeled. I held

to my nose fingertips scented with spring.
Beside me fluttered the wings
of another promise I made but didn't keep.
I sat there for hours until my thighs

were raw, ripped by those rough shingles.
I knew how to perform under the gun,
to tether myself farther and farther afield.
This was before the other daughter

died and only one of us cried, but long after
those old pumpjacks no longer
needled the horizon clean. The velvet mat stayed
unfolded, but I told y'all I prayed

anyway. The sky was famished with stars.
I couldn't help but count each scorched one.

"West Texas Nocturne" from "Registers of Illuminated Villages." Copyright © 2018 by Tarfia Faizullah. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press.