Poetry: Night Shift by Jericho Brown

Image from the collection cover The New Testament, Jericho Brown.

Night Shift

When I am touched, brushed, and measured, I think of myself
As a painting. The artist works no matter the lack of sleep. I am made
Beautiful. I never eat. I once bothered with a man who called me
Snack, Midnight Snack to be exact. I’d oblige because he hurt me
With a violence I mistook for desire. I’d get left hanging
In one room of his dim house while he swept or folded laundry.
When you’ve been worked on for so long, you never know
You’re done. Paint dries. Midnight is many colors. Black and blue
Are only two. The man who tinted me best kept me looking a little
Like a chore. How do you say prepared
In French? How do you draw a man on the night shift? Security
At the museum for the blind, he eats to stay
Awake. He’s so full, he never has to eat again. And the moon goes.

 

Duplex (I Begin With Love)

I begin with love, hoping to end there.
I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.

I don’t want to leave a messy corpse
Full of medicines that turn in the sun.

Some of my medicines turn in the sun.
Some of us don’t need hell to be good.

Those who need least, need hell to be good.
What are the symptoms of your sickness?

Here is one symptom of my sickness:
Men who love me are men who miss me.

Men who leave me are men who miss me
In the dream where I am an island.

In the dream where I am an island,
I grow green with hope.  I’d like to end there.

 

Colosseum

I don’t remember how I hurt myself,
The pain mine
Long enough for me
To lose the wound that invented it
As none of us knows the beauty
Of our own eyes
Until a man tells us they are
Why God made brown. Then
That same man says he lives to touch
The smoothest parts, suggesting our
Surface area can be understood
By degrees of satin. Him I will
Follow until I am as rough outside
As I am within. I cannot locate the origin
Of slaughter, but I know
How my own feels, that I live with it
And sometimes use it
To get the living done,
Because I am what gladiators call
A man in love—love
Being any reminder we survived.

Jericho Brown

In Brown’s poems, the body at risk — the infected body, the queer body, the abused body, the black body, the body in eros — is most vulnerable to the cruelty of the world. But even in their most searing moments, these poems are resilient out of necessity, faithful to their account of survival, when survival is the hardest task of all.

For all their sharp turns and fractures, Brown’s poems don’t feel muscular; instead, their impulse is lush and sensitive, not martial. The “tradition” that Brown interrogates and transforms in this unforgettable poetry collection is the site of death and the site of alivenessness.  (GAY45)

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Author

  • Jericho Brown is author of the 'The Tradition' (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. www.jerichobrown.com

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