01-27-2015
Jamaal May
Ask Where I’ve Been
Let fingers roam
the busy angles
of my shoulders.
Ask why skin dries
in rime-white patches, cracks
like a puddle stepped on. Ask
about the scars that interrupt
blacktop, a keloid on my bicep:
this fogged window. Ask how many
days passed before the eyebrow healed
after a metal spike was torn out,
uprooted lamppost in a tornado.
Ask about the tornado of fists.
The blows landed. If you can
watch it all—the spit and blood frozen
against snow, you can probably tell
I am the too-narrow road winding out
of a crooked city built of laughter,
abandon, feathers, and drums.
Ask only if you can watch streetlights bow,
bridges arc, and power lines sag,
and still believe what matters most
is not where I bend
but where I am growing.
FBI Questioning During the 2009 Presidential Inauguration
Have you always been named Jamaal?
Yes, my name means beauty.
Yes, my name is Gemal in Egypt
and Cemal in Turkey. In Kosovo
Xhemal, and Dzemal in Bosnia.
What it means, in the language
you fear, is beauty has always lived
with the sound of awe at its center.
✖
How long have you lived in Detroit?
Ivy leaves have taken back
a house on the block
where the memory of me is still climbing
the slope of a leveled garage.
A yellow excavator has taken one in its mouth.
The temptation to become ash
has claimed several others.
✖
Are there any explosives in the house?
The new president’s hand
presses to a bible like a branding iron,
and I want to say something
about the eruption of love poems
written by fifth graders on my shelf.
Which list carries my name?
I don’t ask. How many Jamaals
are being questioned right now? I wonder,
but don’t ask. The agents have not come
to burn the pages or cut out my tongue.
They are here to arrest the delusion
of a moment when anybody had one.
✖
Have you spent much time overseas?
I tried to paint an ocean
across my bedroom wall,
but my blood reddened
as soon as it hit air.
I wanted to build a house
from my name, but every letter
in every word was as thin as my arms.
It would be nice to quarantine the county,
tape off city blocks, make a fence
of my teeth, and protect every laugh
inside the borders of me, but when I reach…
the hurried unravel of sinew,
that peculiar popping sound in my ankle.
Teach me how to get my hands
into the air without the gods
knowing about it, because I hear static
sometimes, wonder if my voice is being taped—
listen, listen; someone is writing us down.
The Gun Joke
It’s funny, she says,
how many people are shocked by this shooting
and the next and next and the next.
She doesn’t mean funny as in funny, but funny
as in blood soup tastes funny when you stir in soil.
Stop me if you haven’t heard this one.
A young man/old man/teenage boy
walks into an office/nightclub/day care/church
and empties a magazine into a crowd of strangers/
enemies/family/students.
Ever hear the one about the shotgun? What do you call it
when a shotgun tests a liquor store’s bulletproof glass?
What’s the difference between a teenager
with hands in the air and a paper target charging at a cop?
What do you call it when a man sets his own house on fire,
takes up a sniper position, and waits for firefighters?
Stop me if you haven’t heard this one before.
The first man to pull a gun on me
said it was only a joke,
but never so much as smiled.
The second said, This is definitely not a joke,
and then his laughter crackled through me
like electrostatic—funny how that works.
When she says it’s funny she means funny
as in crazy and crazy as in this shouldn’t happen.
This shouldn’t happen as in something is off. Funny as in
off—as in, ever since a small caliber bullet chipped his spine,
your small friend walks kinda’ funny and his smile is off.
Jamaal May, described by the Boston Review as a “poet as machinist”, writes exquisite paths between the melancholy and the sublime. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, May explores themes of community, dichotomy, and obsolescence. He is the winner of awards ranging from Poetry magazine’s annual Wood prize to the Spirit of Detroit award, given to Detroit citizens for outstanding achievement and service. He has also been a fellow of Cave Canem, The Kenyon Review, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy.
A smash success, May’s debut collection Hum (Alice James Books, 2013) catalogues the anxiety and magic of machines. According to reviewer Marty Cain, the poems of Hum are “a spiritual force, presenting a potential for energy, for both violence and renewal”. Each line is carefully constructed and wired among the others, his vision like an engine that supplies dizzying power and movement. May’s home city, Detroit, is the setting and centerpiece of his mechanical whirr and buzz. He possesses a striking ability to peel back layers of the city, breaking down and reconstructing its image as one builds a machine. Poet Natasha Trethewey praises this quality of his work, remarking that “Hum is concerned with what’s beneath the surfaces of things—the unseen that eats away at us or does the work of sustaining us.” Hum was the winner of the 2012 Beatrice Hawley award and a 2014 Notable Book Award from the American Library Association, as well as earning a spot on The Boston Globe’s list of best books in 2013.
May’s second collection, The Big Book of Exit Strategies (2016), was also published by Alice James. In a Publishers Weekly review, each line is said to “turn the next, like a skeleton key opening an endless hallway of doors”. May often revisits the stark beauty and pain of Detroit in poems such as “There are Birds Here”, while other poems like “FBI Questioning During The 2009 Inauguration” explore moral and political challenges. In an interview with The Normal School, May points out that those who ask how poetry will change the world “seem to start with the implicit assumption that it could.” He says he believes it already does, “but not in the singular immediate way that seems to be demanded by some to justify the creation of literature. It is one of many human endeavors that, taken together, help to repair our minds into more thoughtful devices.”
