Poetry Suite by Mckendy Fils-Aime
“i call it another grave to dig inside myself.”
Poetry my Mckendy Fils-Aime
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the things we sacrificed
the fire pit always looks the same
in the dream, a stubborn sun
we orbit towards– drawn by gravity
or guilt– away from the house my parents built.
my father throws his hands into the flame–
the sacked flint of his fists–
alongside the furniture pieces turned javelins
meant for my mother’s skull.
my mother throws in a photo album
of other men (infidelity is a kind
of gasoline too) & a set of new house keys.
i throw in a wedding ring & a bag
full of index fingers. i throw in letters
to a future self & a box of matchsticks.
its hard to tell when a flame is working
what is memory & what is kindling.
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Housework
you scrubbed me into the carpet
once. it was new year’s day
& we were eating breakfast
when it happened.
you blamed my hands– the quick & clumsy
conductors– for the carpet soaked
with an audience of sun colored grains,
said someone had to clean the mess–
the scattered cereal & milk–
so why not my body? why not
the clothes still on my back,
the newly purchased cotton?
my neck was the handle of a broom
or the back of a brush, there to hold
something only good for collecting
dirty things. when you were done
i was a junkyard for the discarded
remnants of your son
or a filthy flower bloomed
inside your hand; your favorite rag.
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Autotomy
After Rachel McKibbens
the good days are strands of silk
in a stack of needles, worth holding
despite the blood. yet sometimes i think
it’d be easier to cut off my hand & leave
but the stump would likely remind me
of day trips to coney island or stories
you’d share at dinner, my cheeks plump
with laughter. i would remember
saturdays spent in movie theaters
watching my favorite films over & over.
how you taught me that every book
was a love note to my imagination.
i would realize that i couldn’t forget
you at all, before my wrist would start to ache
& just like that: a palm, a thumb, fingers.
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Half-Life: A Letter to My Father on the Eve of His 50th Birthday
because parts of you still live here:
the wooden spoon that severed
across my spine, the basketball
that kissed my mouth bloody,
the boot that crashed into my ribs–
i drove four hours for an exorcism
& all i got was a ghost:
sitting on our old couch, you smiled:
warm, forgetful. & i wondered if
the fallout for abuse is forever.
you said you didn’t know why
my mother left & took the kids
as if you hadn’t written your wedding vows
on police reports, as if i hadn’t watched
you renew them again & again.
love doesn’t owe us kindness when it leaves,
especially when the only language
spoken to it is violence.
you should’ve known that before
you wrote yourself into a haunting
& spent decades waiting to be summoned: a siren
singing long after Odysseus had sailed away.
tomorrow you turn 50 & enter a half-life:
the amount of time it takes for something to fall
to a fraction of its original value.
if you split a man in two,
you will find a less potent version
of himself. if you split him again,
he might disappear altogether.
you are an element breaking
against your own grief, but i still can’t
pity you without thinking radiation
poisoning or forgiveness. how both arrive
unexpected & despite our best efforts.
how giving into either means
part of us will vanish.
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Reverence
After Jennifer Steele
because i was young enough to be embarrassed of eating
wafers & sipping wine with a gaggle of smaller children
but old enough to be thankful for last autumn:
my mother pulling my bruised body from my father’s
grip, leaving him to continue another tantrum under
the flickering circle of fluorescent light in the kitchen,
alone with his wild fists & steel toes, i agreed to go to Linda’s
classes every wednesday night– in a brownstone on the other side
of town– to study for first communion. even when too tired
to question whether or not the heaven in scripture exists,
my tiny frame hunched over a table, eyes watered from sleep
but not the violence of my father’s boot. i wondered
if mercy was the baseline for god & if so who would write
bibles about my mother? years later i would
learn that love is not a form of compromise, nor currency,
but after weeks spent trying to fit hail mary into my mouth,
before announcing my own frustration, when Linda asked why
i was taking these lessons, i said to make my mother happy,
before siphoning this– the most honest hymn sung all session–
back into my mouth, which was easier to swallow than the salt & snot
sniffled after my father lost himself in what he called discipline
& my mother had to pry me from his hands like a broken nail.
for this i owed her everything, even if it meant lying
to avoid listening to Linda lecture for forty minutes
about commitment to faith & making choices
for the right reasons. all i could think of was her
& how disappointed she would be not to see me
in my Sunday best: hands stacked, palms upturned,
lips stained with wine & prayer: She sent out her word
& healed him. She rescued him from the grave.
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Via Negativa
We do not know what God is because God himself does not know what he is.
--Johannes Scotus Eriugena
when i was ten i broke my mom’s favorite vase
a porcelain gourd adorned with roosters.
luckily the pieces were large enough to glue
back together.
that year i used a box of my father’s Trojans
as ammo in a water balloon fight.
he never mentioned the missing condoms once
even when the neighbors reported a bevy
of latex penises flying through the air.
some things are too strange to talk about
so we keep them in the cemeteries
of our histories.
the day after my father left for good
i watched a woman butcher herself
on our front porch, her body pooling blood
all over the steps. the police called this violence
drugs & grief & psychosis.
i call it another grave to dig inside myself.
a human being is made of 90 percent absence.
when we die, we die erasures.
we die memoirs full of blurred passages
as if smudging something out
is the same as removal, as if we can’t
feel all the things we don’t like talking about
rumbling inside our closed mouths.
as if we aren’t clumsy necromancers
who can’t help but bring back the dead.
some mornings i see that woman with a white flag
of a blade sticking out of her wrist. others, i wake
to my father making breakfast in the kitchen.
everything we shove into the shadows
of ourselves has teeth, wants to eat
us from the inside out, to leave us
unrecognizable. but isn’t there
an infinite number of things
our eyes can’t perceive?
theologians state that the most effective
way to understand God is to consider
what he is not.
so i consider the woman with the knife
splaying herself across the concrete
plate of my stoop.
i consider the violent gales that met
my clumsy hands seeking thrill.
i consider how my DNA is a set of instructions
on leaving a loved one behind.
i consider
i consider
i consider
until a herd of secrets stampedes
up my throat.
until the gears in my jaw grease themselves loose
& i am speech & not a closed confession factory
until i am a gate & when i open
my mouth, you swear you can see a light.
you swear that light could be anything.
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Header image courtesy of Daniil Maksyukov. To view his photo essay "Junk and Gems," on NAILED, go here.
Mckendy Fils-Aime is a Haitian-American poet and educator living in Manchester, New Hampshire where he is a co-organizer for the wildly popular poetry reading, Slam Free or Die. He is a Callaloo Fellow whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, Atticus Review, Word Riot, Button Poetry, and elsewhere.