"At the start of the pandemic, I wrote nine lines (three tercets) and asked Laren to write a response in three tercets. This correspondence of improvisations has continued throughout this strange time and perhaps the poetic dialogue has been led by the sway of language, the movement of two minds at play, and the nature of this unfolding moment."

—Yusef Komunyakaa 

Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters

I am lucky my feelings can tincture
godheads, & it is hard for me not to see
a poor woman alone on outlaw streets,

a vampire moon overhead, a drunk
season that brings the night’s terror,
& I feel for those homeless women

because I know the rage of men who
think they own the world, sleeping
in dark alleys in cardboard boxes.

But we know the poverty of women
is an old device of power & submission –
rage is handed down for generations.

I walk these streets my grandmothers
maneuvered in a time of boats arriving
full of dreams about to crash with the market.

But now men wear Kevlar vests & carry
AK 47s & placards on the capital steps
& I tell you peaceful days are numbered.

Yeah, here’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,
where the cold-blooded gunslinger
is sworn in as the next U. S. Marshal,

& a medicine wagon circles a bone yard
peddling miracle cures, as the MC says,
Ladies & gentlemen, it’s show time!

Look, we know an heiress may hold
purse strings to this empire in the hills.
Now, how hard it is to say I’m scared?

Yet streetwise chameleons know ways
to deliver a self-made show. Houdini
disguised himself in a crowd gathered

in Chicago to watch Thardo, defier
of rattlesnakes, inject venom into a white
rabbit before repeatedly allowing

the serpent to flash up & strike her throat.
Had a daily fast made her immune,
or a small dose of milk just after the act?

Sometimes a family potion goes back
a thousand years. A pinch of saltpeter
& a pinch of brown sugar. All I can say

to Houdini’s ghost is this: Mr. Weiss
should never have let a big Canadian
punch him solid in the gut, then hold

a scream inside, handcuff himself, then
submerge his body in a glass box of water,
& give the public a lasting horror show.

But surely sacrifice is the root of infamy.
Who remembers Thardo’s act, every bit
as good as his, except he wrote of her?

Houdini changed his name & knew Russian
roulette was one way to win twice – the man
who frees himself from chains, from the box,

for all to see – or the man in the box on display
who dies his art & the crowd waits his return.
In a séance once, a conjurer said the word, forgive.

Now, the man’s ego rode a white horse.
If I think of the famous & séance
Mary Todd comes forth, one foot

in the South, & the other up North –
old Abe’s Achilles’ heel – a new dress
for an unworldly visit to bring her Willy

across a threshold at the White House.
One has to believe he or she is special,
sitting knowingly between heaven & hell. 

& yet we know she suffered – three sons
in the ground & her husband struck
at the theater while holding her hand.

It was a tragedy, the comedy, at the Ford
that April evening. No wonder she wandered
the streets with bonds sewn into her petticoat

& hired Mumler to capture Lincoln’s ghost,
his hands on her shoulders. Immense grief
causes hallucinations – or is it migraines?

 

 

 

Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Warhorses, Emperor of Water Clocks, and Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (forthcoming from FSG). His honors include the William Faulkner Prize (Université Rennes, France), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art and libretti have been performed internationally and include Saturnalia, Wakonda’s Dream, Testimony, and Gilgamesh. He teaches at New York University. 

 

Laren McClung is the author of a collection of poems, Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow Press), and editor of the anthology Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (W.W. Norton). Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Poetry, Yale Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at New York University.