BPR 52 | 2025
Silence padded the aisles
of the auditorium and feathered the many
empty rows expanding between me
and the guy. His voice was a matchlight
in the fog until the housetech,
as if running in ankle-deep snow,
bounded up the aisle with the mic extended
like an Olympic torch for the handoff,
setting ablaze the guy’s voice with the question
some of us had already grasped in wisps. “I mean,”
he began again, into the mic, hooking
elbows over the seat back in front of him.
“Do you feel guilty?” he said, more
of a comment than a question.
He was in the shadows. The rest of his class
sat closer, near the stage. “Do you ever feel guilty
exploiting former selves for poems?”
But an earflip had me imagining
my former selves as former slaves.
The present is enslaved to the past, I said, riffing,
not exactly in good faith, to his question.
My voice, a layer of smoke, hung over the seats.
It's the past that runs the plantation.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I zoned for a moment.”
He said, “Does this have to be about race? I mean,
it’s like,” and here he thought deeply
to retrieve his question from the briar patch
I’d cast it into. “It’s like your poems are all about you,
but like, maybe your story was never yours to tell.”
From Spectral Evidence (2024), Alfred A. Knopf