THEY DON’T WANT IT

They say they don’t want any poems
about how it’s been 
the same year for two years. About how we’ve grown
tired of the days’ slow wine, though their pressing
against our pelvises was the only
touch sanctioned without gloves or masks. They say
they don’t want poems
with a melody of death — the tinkle
of swollen, suffocated notes rising in search of pockets
within the air, skyspace for final timbre. They say. They say.
I say, breathe.
They say breath?
Didn’t it try to dance us numb, dance us tasteless?
I say, No. They say they don’t want poems that cannot taste,
and I agree. We took to
looking at the world without tasting it for two years
that have felt like one.
But I snuck tastes, lord — her lips and her lips, her nape. They say
they want that poem of the woman I tasted during locked time. But when summer released time,
when it began torquing itself again,
the forces coiled her love away from me. My lips
are now empty. There is no poem
there. There is an aftertaste so strong
because I wasn’t supposed to be tasting and, Lord, I was. That’s the sick I am.
I never got the other sick, the one that yanks people’s soles off the earth.

I say I don’t want to be the vessel for the poem that names everyone
who fell through the floor of the last two years that felt like one.
And some just laid down on the floor of these years, drowning in a tide of feet.

Do they want a poem about feet?

They say, yes, if it is dancing.

A poem is a song that ate its music.
All music has to remember
the dancer,

so maybe they want a poem
for all the dancing we are still doing — our hearts
juking to all the hard music we’ve had to swallow.
We are a poem that doesn’t want the poem
about what just made us.
Let history do that, they say.

They want the poem where breath dances with us like it hasn’t danced in two unmoving years.

Have I given you that? Check your feet
now. Have you moved?

DEAR DYSTOPIA

I am asking myself if you’ve had more than your sweet say? Believe 
me, I remember the urgency of your early notes — the brow-sweat

salt and the rhythm pulse shifting its weight within the measures of your
musculature. But now might you consider releasing your caress of the mic-

stand or lifting your feet off the brass pedals or letting the guitar strings’
shiver settle into a silence, a pause. Your conviction sings

that there can never be enough notes to score the story of an ending world. 
And I’ve heard you, believe me. I’ve felt you crescendo — which is only for a moment,

not for an era. Some of us who’ve been listening, we are seasoned
toe-tappers. Some of us have kept up our coming out to your revival shows

— somehow still here again and again despite how hard you’ve played the blue
notes of no more tomorrows. And there, there’s no residue of ridicule

in my emptied glass — my third or my fourth. My grandmother raised me wiser
than to make small another’s blues. I know you think you love your song, Dystopia, 

but it is only a segment of notes. What you are loving — and in doing so refusing
to release — is your solo, earnest as it is. As truthful in its sonorous fervor as it is. 

And you and I will die and still there will be a song playing. Even if apocalypse 
of some tenor were to yoke you off the stage, snaring and dragging me with you,
there will still be a song playing us out from that earthly venue.

And there will still be a bigger venue. There will still be a lager song titled Is 
Or titled Will Be. A song built of more chorus than verse, and maybe

that makes your verse feel precious. Fills you with fear that the lyrics you know
backward and forward may be muting. But if so, there will be another singer.

History is not a hymnal. It is one multiverse tablature, spooling infinite. Dystopia,
you aren’t singing a latest hit. You are playing within the same song stardust

hummed as shimmied to become the world you believe is ending. Dystopia,
this is no suggestion against you singing. I love you for convincing me

that you and I may be running out of time,
but does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind the clocks? Maybe

timelessness is the future. Maybe you cannot play or sing the future away.

Kyle Dargan is the author of the poetry collection Anagnorisis (TriQuarterly/Northwestern UP, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His four previous collections, Honest Engine (2015), Logorrhea Dementia (2010), Bouquet of Hungers (2007) and The Listening (2003) were all published by the University of Georgia Press. For his work, he has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. His books have also been finalists for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer Awards Grand Prize. Dargan has partnered with the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities to produce poetry programming at the White House and Library of Congress. He's worked with and supports a number of youth writing organizations, such as 826DC, Writopia Lab, Young Writers Workshop and the Dodge Poetry high schools program. He is currently an Associate Professor of literature and Asst. Director of creative writing at American University, as well as the founder and editor of POST NO ILLS magazine. He also works as a Managing Editor for Janelle Monae's creative company, Wondaland. Originally from Newark, New Jersey, Dargan is a graduate of Saint Benedict's Prep, The University of Virginia and Indiana University.