Ordinary Beast Read online

  in defense of “candelabra with heads”

  If you’ve read the “Candelabra with Heads”

  that appears in this collection and the one

  in The Animal, thank you. The original,

  the one included here, is an example, I’m told,

  of a poem that can speak for itself, but loses

  faith in its ability to do so by ending with a thesis

  question. Yeats said a poem should click shut

  like a well-made box. I don’t disagree.

  I ask, “Who can see this and not see lynchings?”

  not because I don’t trust you, dear reader,

  or my own abilities. I ask because the imagination

  would have us believe, much like faith, faith

  the original “Candelabra” lacks, in things unseen.

  You should know that human limbs burn

  like branches and branches like human limbs.

  Only after man began hanging man from trees

  then setting him on fire, which would jump

  from limb to branch like a bastard species

  of bird, did we come to know such things.

  A hundred years from now, October 9, 2116,

  8:18 p.m., when all but the lucky are good

  and dead, may someone happen upon the question

  in question. May that lucky someone be black

  and so far removed from the verb lynch that she be

  dumbfounded by its meaning. May she then

  call up Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads.

  May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.

  instead of executions, think death erections

  I wish the day hadn’t.

  Dawn has claimed

  another sky, its birds.

  I watch from my burning

  stake the broken necks.

  Once, this lot

  allowed wildflowers—

  nothing worse than bruised

  wildflowers. Darling

  dawn, death mask

  to which I’ve grown

  accustomed, show me

  one pretty thing

  no heavier

  than a hummingbird.

  unframed

  Handle this body. Spoil

  it with oils. Let the

  residue corrode, ruin it.

  I have no finish, no

  fragile edge. (On what

  scrap of me have we

  not made desire paths,

  so tried as to bury

  ourselves therein?) I

  beg: spare me gloved

  hands, monuments to

  nothing. I mean to die a

  relief against every wall.

  object permanence

  [FOR JOHN]

  We wake as if surprised the other is still there,

  each petting the sheet to be sure.

  How have we managed our way

  to this bed—beholden to heat like dawn

  indebted to light. Though we’re not so self-

  important as to think everything

  has led to this, everything has led to this.

  There’s a name for the animal

  love makes of us—named, I think,

  like rain, for the sound it makes.

  You are the animal after whom other animals

  are named. Until there’s none left to laugh,

  days will start with the same startle

  and end with caterpillars gorged on milkweed.

  O, how we entertain the angels

  with our brief animation. O,

  how I’ll miss you when we’re dead.

  notes

  “Medical History”: Though the last line of the poem suggests otherwise, the stars in the sky are most likely not dead. The distance between the stars and us is so great that we can only see the brightest stars, which is to say the most alive.

  “Candelabra with Heads”: 2006, Thomas Hirschhorn, part of the Tate Collection. The poem is written in a form created by the author called Obverse. The poem’s second half is written in the reverse order of the first and the last line is the “thesis question” of the poem.

  “Legendary” (Venus Xtravaganza): Venus Xtravaganza was an Italian American transgender performer featured in Paris Is Burning, a documentary film about drag pageants in 1980s Harlem.

  “It’s Not Fitness, It’s a Lifestyle”: The poem shares its title with the slogan of the luxury gym Equinox.

  “The First Person Who Will Live to Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born”: The title is borrowed from “Who wants to live forever? Scientist sees aging cured,” the Reuters article by Health and Science Correspondent Kate Kelland.

  “In Igboland”: The poem refers to the construction of an mbari in Nigeria. An mbari is a building erected in response to a major catastrophe and dedicated to one or several local deities. The majority of which are made for Ala, goddess of earth.

  “Legendary” (Pepper LaBeija): Pepper LaBeija was an African American female impersonator featured in Paris Is Burning.

  “And”: The poem is inspired by Thomas Sayers Ellis’s poem entitled “Or.”

  “Cento for the Night I Said, ‘I Love You’”: The poem is comprised entirely of lines borrowed from the following poets (in order of appearance): C. D. Wright, Mary Jo Salter, Patricia Smith, Toi Derricotte, Philip Levine, Lynda Hull, Langston Hughes, Malachi Black, Kimberly Blaeser, Maxine Kumin, Afaa Michael Weaver, Hédi Kaddour, dg nanouk okpik, Claude McKay, Deborah Landau, Sharkmeat Blue, George Bradley, Yona Harvey, Federico García Lorca, June Jordan, Kwame Dawes, W. H. Auden, Ana Castillo, Erica Hunt, Muriel Rukeyser, Ed Roberson, Ruth Madievsky, Thylias Moss, Gregory Orr, Yusef Komunyakaa, Elizabeth Spires, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Tim Seibles, Nathalie Handal, Wisława Szymborska, Lucille Clifton, C. P. Cavafy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Raúl Zurita, August Kleinzahler, Louise Glück, Victoria Redel, Adélia Prado, Sonia Sanchez, Jean Sénac, Claribel Alegría, Remica L. Bingham-Risher, Sylvia Plath, Harryette Mullen, Emily Dickinson, Eric Gamalinda, Galway Kinnell, John Murillo, Sharon Strange, Larry Levis, Sherman Alexie, Franz Wright, Marianne Boruch, Andrea Cohen, Linda Susan Jackson, Carl Phillips, Robert Hayden, Eavan Boland, Anne Waldman, Dorianne Laux, Natasha Trethewey, Yves Bonnefoy, Tina Chang, David Wojahn, Nick Laird, Simone White, Catherine Barnett, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Brenda Shaughnessy, Kazim Ali, Brenda Hillman, Valzhyna Mort, Blas Falconer, Theodore Roethke, Kahlil Gibran, Rita Dove, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Khaled Mattawa, Tracy K. Smith, Ed Skoog, Alice Walker, Pablo Neruda, Adrienne Rich, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Aimé Césaire, Jake Adam York, Bob Kaufman, William Blake, Frank Bidart, Marilyn Nelson, Polina Barskova, Santee Frazier, Suheir Hammad, Cornelius Eady.

  “Virginia is for Lovers”: The poem shares its title with the tourism and travel slogan of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

  “Clue”: The poem is inspired by the murder mystery game of the same name.

  “C ue”: is an erasure of “Clue.”

  “Imagine Sisyphus Happy”: The title is borrowed from the final sentence of Albert Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The lines “Give me a face that toils/so closely with stone, it is itself/stone” are loosely borrowed from the essay as well.

  “Legendary” (Octavia Saint Laurent): Octavia Saint Laurent was an African American transgender performer featured in Paris Is Burning.

  “An Apology for Trashing Magazines in Which You Appear”: The poem is inspired by Denise Duhamel’s poem entitled “Delta Flight 659.”

  “In Defense of ‘Candelabra with Heads’”: “The Animal” refers to the chapbook The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named.

  “Object Permanence”: Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be observed.

  acknowledgments

  I am grateful to the editors of the following publications where some of these poems, excerpts or versions of these poems, first appeared: The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-
Day Series, The Account, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2011, Buzzfeed Reader, Callaloo, Copper Nickel, Day One, The Feminist Wire, Literary Hub, Narrative, The New Sound, The New Yorker, No Tokens, Pinwheel, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Provincetown Arts Magazine, Stonecutter, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, The Village Voice, and Washington Square Review. With appreciation to Northwestern University Press, which published a selection of these poems in the chapbook The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named.

  Huge thanks to Ecco’s Bridget Read and Allison Saltzman for putting up with me, and my editor Daniel Halpern for believing in this work. With lots of love to my ride- or- die first readers: John Murillo, Petra Martin, and Martha Collins. Deep gratitude to my teachers: Chris Abani, Catherine Barnett, Andrea Cohen, Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Kimiko Hahn, Yusef Komunyakaa, Deborah Landau, Marilyn Nelson, Willie Perdomo, Sharon Olds, Alan Shapiro, and Patricia Smith. Thank you to friends who read poems from Ordinary Beast before there was an Ordinary Beast: Jericho Brown, Naomi Jackson, Tyehimba Jess, Rickey Laurentiis, Roger Reeves, and Metta Sáma.

  Shout-outs to my comrades at Cave Canem and my classmates at NYU for their suggestions and support. Neal Thompson and Katie Raissian, your generosity knows no bounds.

  Many thanks to the following institutions, without which I would not have had the resources to complete this collection: Atlantic Center for the Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Elizabeth George Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hedgebrook, New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern University, and the Poetry Project.

  Lastly, dear reader, thank you.

  about the author

  Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., and raised in Apopka, Florida, NICOLE SEALEY is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  copyright

  ORDINARY BEAST. Copyright © 2017 by Nicole Sealey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST ECCO HARDCOVER EDITION

  Cover Design by Allison Saltzman

  Cover Art: Queen Bea, 2016. Digital Print © Deborah Dancy

  ISBN 978-0-06-268880-4

  EPub Edition September 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-268882-8

  about the publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada

  www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive

  Rosedale 0632

  Auckland, New Zealand

  www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF, UK

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  www.harpercollins.com