over dumplings & rice, Nancy says you’re welcome
as she considers her ancestors & the golds
they left, a mug of oolong clenched in her hands, tight
claws. for the plants & their leaves you steep, the anti
-oxidants, the paper, the bark, the silk of the insects.
you’re welcome for the gunpowder, for the color
unfurling across the cloudless dark. charcoal, sulphur,
potassium nitrate. for the fireworks, for every beauty
you’ve considered &i hear it, you’re welcome,as i remember
the boy from my youth & the pistol he pointed
toward heaven above, stems with lavender at their ends
spewing out & up.Janelle, across the table, lips on crab
& sucking at the flesh, speaks of the peony tattoo
she once wished upon her right shoulder, the lit end
of a wick that would have traced & sprawled the petals,
pink & white, across the sky of her skin. on her phone, Nancy’s brother
has gotten the all clear, a campus in Michigan safe now
after a balloon popped & the sound echoed like the march
of a rifle or a Roman candle’s salvo atop a neck
of smoke. i heard there were girls shrieking in Ann Arbor,
the pang of air prompting a cry & a giggle that someone must have took
for grief. Janelle tells us that she’s learned to consider the tears
of sound outside her Bushwick window as celebrations,
that she waits for laughter, slips of delight in place of violence.
it was fireworks first, gunpowder in China. then, more potent, the guncotton,
the fickle soft in the back of the barrel that often ruined the gun
while propelling the bullet. a kind of nitrated cellulose used, too,
for photographs & x-rays, the negatives exposed & light carving proof
of bone onto canvas. & now, Cordite or Ballistite or smokeless
powders in the guns today that leave no evidence but the ghost’s flash
behind the bullet’s departure. in the restaurant, the waiter slams
a new plate on the table, on purpose or by mistake, &
i hear it, this was all for you, as i remember the story properly this time:
the boy pointing the pistol square between my eyes or the eyes
that could be my eyes, the florets turning in the flesh
of my thinking & the fear that grew there: the bullet’s case
carrying the bullet & its alchemy, the image intricate & etched
across the dark of my mind, image of the night blooming
with me.
“you’re welcome” was the winner of the 2019 Robert and Adele Schiff Award for poetry.
See more poems from Issue 17.1 by purchasing a copy in our online store. Digital copies only $5.
