unbearable – Monday with the Muse

unbearable

looking at the unbearable
i imagine a neon sign
i feel the weight
of air, the presence
of light under
my skin
like gold
beneath
black…

~kat

A blackout poem inspired by the poem, “At the Beach” by Elizabeth Alexander below:

At the Beach
BY ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

Looking at the photograph is somehow not
unbearable: My friends, two dead, one low
on T-cells, his white T-shirt an X-ray
screen for the virus, which I imagine
as a single, swimming paisley, a sardine
with serrated fins and a neon spine.

I’m on a train, thinking about my friends
and watching two women talk in sign language.
I feel the energy and heft their talk
generates, the weight of their words in the air
the same heft as your presence in this picture,
boys, the volume of late summer air at the beach.

Did you tea-dance that day? Write poems
in the sunlight? Vamp with strangers? There is
sun under your skin like the gold Sula
found beneath Ajax’s black. I calibrate
the weight of your beautiful bones, the weight
of your elbow, Melvin,
on Darrell’s brown shoulder.

“At the Beach” by Elizabeth Alexander. From Body of Life, published by Tia Chucha Press. Copyright 1996 Elizabeth Alexander. Used by permission of the author.
Source: Body of Life (Tia Chucha, 1996)