Anodyne Read online

  “Khadijah Queen’s poems are fire and sacred song. From heart-stopping familial narratives—a son awash in sadness, an aging mother’s boulder-smiting love, a brother turned to dust by a bullet—to formal inventiveness and experimentation, this is writing that makes the hardship of being alive transcendent. These poems swirl the pain of our lives with a neon kind of sweetness. Queen’s writing endures the revolt of the body with verbal play and a powerful, radical vulnerability. Anodyne is urgent and fragile, manifesting the beautiful danger in being alive.”

  —ALEX LEMON, author of Another Last Day

  “Anodyne captivates with poignant, resilient poems; ones that face toughness with lucidity: of losing family and facing landscapes full of ‘untended loveliness of the forsaken.’ All of which builds an affective and luminous sense of record, of observing and perceiving. The poems speak to ‘How we fail is how we continue’ and construct insight with breathtaking momentum through frank, sonorous, and delicate diction; furthermore, the poems carry forth an analysis from the person to the systemic, recognizing and remembering ‘when pain was not to be seen or looked at, / but institutionalized. Invisible, unspoken, / transformed but not really transformed.’ The poems are full of a vital and recuperative prosody: erasures, odes, synesthetic centers; Queen’s commanding style: building the poetic edges that are laced with endeavors, hurdles, grace, and truth into an eye-wide and powerfully deep poetry collection.”

  —PRAGEETA SHARMA, author of Grief Sequence

  “Khadijah Queen’s newest collection, Anodyne, is a study of form & cavedwell, feminism as foresight, and archives the articulation of black excellence & resilience. This is the complexity fans of Queen’s work have grown because of. How she shapes each poem to the sound of a hand, photograph, fractured reflection, and a throat. Anodyne as a noun is a painkilling medicine. These poems are a painkilling medicine. They provoke, incite, and steer steady as scripture. Each meter is breath, each beat encourages reassessment by the reader unto themselves. Who we be beneath the dust & dust & fallen arches of our name? Many (re)discoveries are assured with the preciseness of Queen’s poetic legend.”

  —MAHOGANY L. BROWNE, author of Black Girl Magic

  “Khadijah Queen is a brilliant poet. I recommend this book to anyone who ever had a child or a parent, who ever had a body or loved, to anyone who was ever sick or tried to sleep a good night’s sleep, and failed, and tried again. . . . This is a powerful and dazzling collection, filled with wisdom and experience. Anyone who reads Anodyne will remember it for a long time.”

  —ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic

  ANODYNE

  KHADIJAH QUEEN

  for Kim Smith—

  for your brilliance & enduring belief

  CONTENTS

  In the event of an apocalypse, be ready to die

  Of all the things I love

  Erosion

  Double windlass

  Live unadorned

  Monologue for personae

  Copper men

  Something about the way I am made is not made

  Dementia is one way to say fatal brain failure

  I have a method of letting go

  A tiny now to feed on

  Horizon erasure

  Ut pictura poesis

  X

  The rule of opulence

  Antediluvian

  Sestina for personae

  Sky erasure

  Synesthesia

  Ode to 180 pairs of white gloves

  I dreamt you at the Tate

  Retreat

  Reclusionary

  In the quiet

  Declination

  If gold, your figure as mirror on the ground is

  Eclogue for personae

  The world says not to expect the world

  I watch exact in disconnect

  Ode to the accuracy of intuition

  Precipitation erasure

  Anodyne

  Imminence

  NJ Transit passenger ode

  Ancient mother I keep teaching us new ways to find joy

  Afterlight erasure

  Common miracles

  I watch the endless breakage of wings

  Route

  Double life

  Epilogue for personae

  I slept when I couldn’t move

  Notes & Acknowledgments

  Painkillers only put me in the twilight

  —Kendrick Lamar

  We know ourselves as part and as crowd,

  in an unknown that does not terrify.

  —Édouard Glissant

  Wasn’t it you who told me civilization is

  impossible in the absence of a spirit of play.

  —Anne Carson

  IN THE EVENT OF AN APOCALYPSE, BE READY TO DIE

  But do also remember galleries, gardens,

  herbaria. Repositories of beauty now

  ruin to find exquisite—

  untidy, untended loveliness of the forsaken,

  of dirt-studded & mold-streaked

  treasures that no longer belong to anyone

  alive, overrunning

  & overflowingly unkempt monuments to

  the disappeared. Chronicle the heroes & mothers,

  artisans who went to the end of the line,

  protectors & cowards. Remember

  when pain was not to be seen or looked at,

  but institutionalized. Invisible, unspoken,

  transformed but not really transformed. Covered up

  with made-up valor or resilience. Some

  people are not worth saving, no one wants

  to say, but they say it in judgment. They say it

  in looking away. They say it in staying safe in a lane

  created by someone afraid of losing ground,

  thinking—I doubt we’re much to look at,

  as we swallow what has to hurt until we can sing

  sharp as blades. Aiming for the sensational

  as we settle for the ordinary, avoiding

  evidence of suffering at all costs, & reach

  clone-like into the ground as aspen roots, or slide

  feet first down a soft slope, wet, cold—but the faith

  to fall toward the unseen, the bleak of most

  memory—call it elusive. Call it the fantasy to end

  all fantasies, a waiting fatality, blight of both

  education & habit. Warned inert,

  we could watch ourselves, foolish, lose it all.

  OF ALL THE THINGS I LOVE

  My son wants to leave, depression making

  talk of permanent exit a habit. I make him

  laugh, a temporary stay, spend every penny

  I have to keep him in the comfort and joy

  of computer games and good eating—his idea,

  anyway, fried and meaty and overdosing

  on pancakes and Golden Oreos and steamed

  chocolate with whole milk. I don’t drink much,

  but I want to. Since last summer the Woodford

  only halved. Why can’t I be myself in this world,

  over and over he asks me, knowing I’m powerless

  everywhere except home regardless of what I say.

  I would move the fucking universe for you, I say,

  as many times as I have to, and we both know how

  fragile my body is compared to my mind. My energy

  never stopped fueling two. He likes to humor me.

  He knows better and has the scars to prove it,

  but he believes I will try, having never seen me give up

  without a fight that ended in the wreck of someone else,

  even if it cost me, too. Sunlight debilitates him and night

  keeps him angry awake. How do I tell him that I’m tired?

&
nbsp; EROSION

  10 million years casts any movement as given. Grand Mesa—prone

  to rockslide but craters at Dotsero stay young. Once,

  lava flow took a mile of highway, stretched out its red heat & black

  smoke rising grey to white, no lake, crawling baby of magma

  & water. When snow-topped, both still boom with basalt.

  That molten underground we swim the surface of.

  In Palisade the low range casts no shadow over the vines, peaks

  rising inward as separate entities, stark high earth and low-height

  green. Road dust cradles the ground. I go there with a friend

  A drink in the evening

  becomes two, laughter then a free confession overlooking lavender

  fields—man-made, another desert verdanted, in which one person

  admits they are precious enough to hide—the night brings out

  hunters—intoning survival in that shadow, blink of life in swallow

  & vapor, body ever in revolt, a red centimeter of a mouth

  asking what else. How we fail is how we continue.

  DOUBLE WINDLASS

  after Pizarnik & McMorris

  under volcanic

  moonshadow

  double twilight

  took

  the honeycomb

  infatuates

  city moss

  in lateral sail

  chapels

  bees

  grotto—

  whitelit

  invocations—

  on dawn’s

  broad summit

  a glad populace afar

  a whole-mouthed

  sea

  LIVE UNADORNED

  Turn the wake

  sublime—

  Identify a new habit

  in progress a good succulent

  in a sea of smooth pebbles

  A sky can be grey

  even in a warm

  off-season

  In defiance of time

  the smallest people dance in it

  naturally

  They want to

  have the last sound

  MONOLOGUE FOR PERSONAE

  Disguised as an I (no direction)we say:

  Hello, disarray. Soft hip abridged, subaltern superstructure—

  We came to exist in apparent psychological systems

  We arrived starlit, not dust-borne, ending in decayed light

  Under certain circumstances, we sit in drawings

  like some old sir, as cold as refusal, wingless.

  We came with merchant discipline. Light with stealth, in our anti-prime.

  Implicit: private rages to thwart

  most paramount wants, sultanistic

  without asking, outside time, inside unknown

  epochs. We created ourselves out of

  parking lots, an organized chorus repeating I want to go home

  In varying intonations, with variant urgencies,

  we came to (no direction) the opposite of illusion

  We came to silken the asterism

  We came drunk off sea liquor to unravel threads of flesh

  We came to be shaped, enough repetition

  We came to be in flux, unnamed, then pronounced by care

  We came to have our newness used up by the wrong power,

  We came to be tucked back into embrace

  We came to shutter the past in our ignorance

  We came to shutter the past in our enlightenment

  (Black box / Red chair / Red flowers on a table,

  dead or alive. Some spiraling of strange light)

  COPPER MEN

  As an afterthought

  bring you bent wires to

  cuff your small wrists.

  Think delicate bones

  under soft flesh when

  it dawns in some far

  latitude where you are not

  forgettable yet. Accept

  every offered scrap—

  talk, metal, touch. Exchange

  twisted infinitudes learned hard

  ways, flake & tarnish.

  For the next artisan, you

  forge a mulish silver

  preference—by no known

  means compliant

  SOMETHING ABOUT THE WAY I AM MADE IS NOT MADE

  to make sense—I stretch my insides

  across pages until my pain is upside down. Peonies &

  tulips bloom red & pink from my back,

  bent like washerwomen’s knees—

  full-on shadow. But I could have neon

  feathers if I wanted—faux

  apparatus of flight. I could have cultivated in error

  the bad luck of odd numbers.

  Spectators claim

  ancestral innocence, as ever—a suit

  two sizes too small for escape & inside the coveted

  dance, I first look down at extraneous steps

  in shame. For all my notes

  & vices, I still long to stop the false

  fight for my humanity, en masse, allowed to share

  a history of anything but suffering

  DEMENTIA IS ONE WAY TO SAY FATAL BRAIN FAILURE

  Whose mind loses when

  the loved decline.

  Human by whose degrees. Capability

  and refusal twined up in

  loose fog, time-shocked. A body is what

  without its engine. How do I let go of my mother

  before she is gone? Predator grief doesn’t watch,

  yellow-eyed, from hidden grasses

  like a real apex. We slow-feed that wraith. Viscera.

  I HAVE A METHOD OF LETTING GO

  Asthmatic child in a house full of smokers, I crawled once

  under toxic clouds to find my mother

  I was so brave I almost died, or desperate

  I wanted her more than breath

  I was so small & she could sing

  anything alive, almost

  She didn’t really know, doesn’t know now—

  She is familiar with duty & made me so

  I can’t live on that loss

  In 1977 a bullet turned my brother into dust

  His 18 years here, an invisible talisman we hold in our callous living

  Sometimes I think my mother smoked to pretend to breathe him in

  A TINY NOW TO FEED ON

  So clear the heart after

  the unreal takes up—

  I’ve not learned

  what to sew besides

  more, other scars—

  how to live exuberant with settle

  too much room

  underneath skin feels like crossing

  to stay golden Seconds wasted

  count as wanting, preening

  o reactionary

  hushes, mean illusory

  I held close or trashed

  in fear The Great American terrain

  I can’t carry without my spine

  —gold rings, bare wrists

  weakening at pressure

  points I don’t tend often

  enough. I take all

  A break is just the space

  between a cutting,

  my skin holds, try not to

  think about withering, a potion for

  whatever you don’t want—belonging

  in failed ways,

  failure meaning a field

  wrecked by birds

  or a field meaning nothing.

  If in the air, believe

  In my body pitch

  selfishness as religion Devotion at least,

  knifelike, everything else abraded,

  even the sky, that sear

  HORIZON ERASURE

  Blue-grey braceleted Hollow

  torrent threat

  comes on cloud shift. What about letting go

  Ivy clung to passageway ceilings, some grass on

  shoes Untied

  Blood moon

  tried to take my son />
  Stop refusing to understand

  UT PICTURA POESIS

  How do I fancy a good atonement Homebound body

  so slow to bounce back from overuse, meaning, darling,

  A cuff of immensity threads me— centrifugal

  I could fragment thus a rifle shard in a blood flick, dew

  perched upon arrival

  Where travel is a future &

  not such arts

  as ordinary inheritance azure mass—explicit menace

  in a wing lull I try not to take

  My mother, grandmother for granted

  & not their elegant fierceness in flight—How do

  I resurrect the excised archive of my relatives

  How to use the word

  love, mean it my animal glow—sacred rot

  This luxury of time to even ask:Who were they

  X

  In Blombos Cave an etching—

  a cave of swimmers. a lake of sand dunes. in every rock a green