Three Poems by Camille Rankine
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, guest editor Heather Christle features three poems by Camille Rankine. About Rankine’s work, Christle writes: “In this group of urgent, haunted, determined poems, a young poet asks us to consider what a country is, ‘what category of disaster.’ Turning received phrases inside out, or against themselves, or spiraled through linebreaks and caesuras, Rankine arranges words into a necessary document of this particular moment in our nation’s history, our many failures, the ‘armed voices’ and open mouths of those whose bodies are permitted to survive. I’m grateful that Rankine’s voice sings here, fierce and rough and clear.”
Horror Vacui
I look into the air it presses on me
a gale knocking
at my chest my paltry
bag of hungers and dubiety I want
for wonder for anything
to say to ask a question
of an empty room and a ghost
in the doorway mouths
something about change
but everything is static
or I am the ghost and without question
the room crowds me out the whole room
runs right through me
I am transfixed I stack my slip of skin
against the atmosphere
I can’t contain myself but I can only
see so far I lift
my face to the dark and the dark
fills me because I am small and it is night
I make shapes of the stars
E Pluribus Unum
by the glow of our equality I keep myself inside and when the sun
descends I descend and furtive in the dark I take
my difference for a walk
a woman stands before me with an open mouth as if to speak
I fix my face into position something kin to understanding
I have settled all my awe and weary at our living into
if it’s all the same I say I reach my hand into the darkened day
as a woman turns her open mouth
closed and far away
and looking up we watch the kingdom on the hilltop
shift to rearrange and all the same
parts click and lock into their place
I move toward the living after all the only ones still here
for which I stand or rather have considered amity
and how much of a man am I what fraction
of me is mine and what belongs to a pattern
repeated endlessly I do not want to be afraid
I have decided I am not
afraid and in this hopeful state I call out to the living
we have been cleansed word has come down
from the hilltop we are one
people so we put our differences aside and quiet
our single mind we rest against the dark and let our eyes
adjust accordingly
The Great Dying
this is what happens: the sky
provides the ground opens one day
swallows a man entire the smoke
lifts the citizens gathering
on the hilltop the citizens consume
the scene a nation
cheers a nation mourns this
is what happens: a woman hangs
her head a good citizen
an exhibition a woman
moving in the wrong
body quick
combustion each voice armed
and at the ready each heart
moving just keeping on
like a muscle what is
a country what category of disaster
this is what happens: the sky
where we imagine
tumult just is it is
the end we seek
shelter we are good
citizens we shut up
our eyes for so long
we wait and wait
the room grows smaller
the sea rises up
to meet us
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