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The establishment poet writes poems with subtle rhymes and gentle wit that has no bite and beautiful, reassuring lines about how you are loved and the world is kind— lines you might find printed on coffee mugs or stitched on throw pillows in department stores, lines that might make a cheugy gal sigh, “Well isn’t …

Maze 20 Maze 19 Maze 8 Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships …

Over a hundred years, no doubt, & big enough to need grinding, left instead to gray& grow smooth.

We were traveling in Melbourne Australia back in January of 2018. The location was at the entrance to the Melbourne Museum of Art. The image was made looking through a window that had water running down on the outside.

The man at the window is my father. He has lost most of his sight and suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. His vision drifts and spins, the wind blowing light across the yard of his house on Blackhawk Street. All day he sits in his chair looking out, seeing cats and Cadillacs, rabbits with mittens, a child with red hair, weary soldiers standing in a circle smoking. All are born of light, all a blur of energy and memory. Something green is swallowing something white, a boat perhaps on stormy Pine Lake.

The dream goes like this: barefoot in the grass, I follow the white brick wall that separates the gated community from the sprawling golf course behind it. My left-hand grazes the wall as I pass a dozen back patios with the same glass tables, the same expandable umbrellas, deck chairs, potted mums, hoses coiled perfectly into stacked loops. The blinds are closed in each dim window of each sleeping house. One of the houses is where I live with my partner, JM, who is sleeping as everyone else sleeps.

They don’t stop you for fingerprints this time, Ma, now that you’ve squeezed yourself into an urn. After our 22-hour flight from Kolkata jolts to the ground in Portland, Oregon, Miguel and I sashay with you through the airport. Ma, you wouldn’t believe it—how delicate and unobtrusive the TSA agents are with urn-bound you. Hell, maybe we immigrants should be born into urns. When you’re swathed in one, no one frisks you. They don’t deny you entry into this country for not having fingerprints. 

Literature may not fix our problems, but it fixes us to one another. It allows us to see that the view from another’s space in this world is both akin to ours and radically different.

In 2019, scientists at the New England Aquarium in Boston published a paper on chronic illness in whales by studying and measuring the stress hormones left behind on baleen plates. While I lack a push-broom mouth for filter-feeding, my teeth show the wreckage of the neglect and trauma I endured as a child. My CPTSD is well medicated, but still: so much stress, a lifetime of fighting. Research clearly shows that children who grow up with chronic abuse are more likely to develop chronic health problems as adults. After years of reading about trauma, I have finally aged into the statistic I’ve been destined for since childhood.

Death draws a veil over the living. Like a somber version of the game, my sister Zoya and I played as kids. We’d get under the bed sheet when Mom was spreading it over the mattress. We’d bounce the sheet and catch fleeting glimpses of each other as the soft cotton rose and fell over our bodies. We’d try to escape half-heartedly, but our little bodies continued to move around in circles playing peekaboo.