Aaron Coleman
In the City of Tenderness and Desperate Promises
Punctured in a soft hour, we tried a new way home
past the pawn shop neon-green with memory. She
came away with me from broken roads. Bird bone
litters tall, forgotten weeds. We paused to try to see
inside each fractured hollow. But hard rain hurried us
as slanted ground that was a risk became a gulch—
silent, tilted heads appeared to pray on a passing city bus,
but eyes lie—Who am I to say that I have seen too much
to trust another stranger? To learn to start over?
The end got here before us. Each footprint deep and flooded
with chemical runoff; technicolor surfaces, but no real border.
Bones don’t float; the birds’ or our own. The route turned
blue and bottomless, but it wasn’t waves and isn’t
water. Just consequence. We wander in wet endless sound
and learn to call it falling—until she says, “This love is a decision
to forget and keep going.” And nothing else. I wonder if we are bound
to drown in chance and mangled maps. Slick with rain, rock moss riots
money-green until tornado-green, churning, like our city’s restless silence.
Aaron Coleman is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) and the chapbook, St. Trigger, selected by Adrian Matejka for the 2015 Button Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in journals including Boston Review, Callaloo, and The New York Times Magazine. A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow, Aaron is the winner of the American Literary Translators Association’s Jansen Fellowship, the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Contest, and The Cincinnati Review Schiff Award. After completing an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, Aaron is currently there as a PhD student in Comparative Literature studying poetry and translation of the African Diaspora in the Americas.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.