Joshua Corey's Blog, page 4

100 Words: Retreat from the heat

Retreat from the heat that has Evanston in its grip, all day at home trying to teach, read, parent, work—but my entire mind is taken up with what’s happening outside, with what’s starting to feel like a general strike, an unignorable insurrection. The president is a symptom, an irritant, the face of an ancient fascism, the face of the white supremacy that preceded him and will still be here long after he’s gone—but confronted, more visible, the object of a national repentance, of an American Vergangenheitsbewältigung. We have to become what we will become. George Floyd. George Floyd. George Floyd.

100 Words: Eerie howl of wind

Eerie howl of wind stalks the corners of Igor Levit playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #4 in my earbuds as I round the lakefill pond on my usual route to the bigger blue slate of Lake Michigan, the air soft as a bruise pushing through my shirt, leaning against the slope I make in my usual fast falling walk. On a silver tanker truck I pass the words NATURE INC. Rain punches waves. People died yesterday putting their bodies under the police machine, and more may die tonight. For today’s hundredth word, then, this link: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019

100 Words: Back to the water

Back to the water, to the water, to the indifferent edge of things. The skateboarders sitting on the bridge smoking pot, not skateboarding; the overflowing trash cans with the Chick-Fil-A bags; the array of beagles, four of ‘em, pulling their compliant master behind them: everything takes on a political edge. Black men in the white crowd differently visible; the skateboarders take long solemn drags in time to softly blaring trip hop; I want to hug them, to give them something of value, simply to share the space. It’s not so hard. Close your eyes and it’s summer. “This Is America.”

100 Words: What are words worth

What are words worth when cops run amok and my city burns with the others, at the end of another day of nearly hallucinatory late spring beauty? My small experience, my paltry nude. They who have power to hurt and will do none. And they who do? The fires lick at the edges of everything, they glow in the center of our eyes, too bright finally to ignore. This is the peace that is no peace, only stillness. This is the injustice that is socially distanced as window air conditioners whitely whir, counting the breaths of isolatoes in the dark.

100 Words: Night drifts

Night drifts into its center without anyone quite realizing it—balance tipped from the light of dusk to the dark swelling up from the ground, streetlights and windows the signs of life, life in darkness, life ignorant and strong. Let these words at least add nothing to others’ suffering. When will the faces that rise to the surface of our screens finally be seen as such? When will we sacrifice something—anything—for the sake of putting some pressure on the wound? George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Armaud Arbery. Names parade when the body dies, burning like the sun. It was a beautiful day.

The Poem’s Minority

My words can capture so little
Even the roseate flakes of the orchid
Are better captured by my hand
Leaving you to guess at
The ephemeralities of mood.

Gosse believed in the circle
Of flat time like Rust Cole:
Start anywhere in history
And God fills in behind you
Like a sweeper in his jumpsuit.

Satisfying neither believers nor atheists
Indicating like a terrible actor
The dog studies his master’s finger
And the tennis ball goes uncaught—
See? We’ve dropped it again.

This poem was written in a basement
Surrounded by bikes and miscellaneous
Trash. My finger hovers over
The send key, but I doubt
That anyone’s there to receive it.

I doubt in other words this
The indefinite pronoun of my life
Tenderly planting the fossils
Of fictitious dinosaurs in your past
Following the petal’s whorl 

To the likeness of water and flower. 

100 Words: Frame of sticks

Frame of sticks in our building’s front yard that some of the kids erected—a skeletal model of shelter in the lap of our actual shelter, six brick units with six families mixing more or less promiscuously, a pod or lifeboat floating us through the quarantine. I sit in the shade of the boxelder that’s been growing out front as long, maybe, as the building has existed, its sheltering crown making the third floor where I live into a kind of treehouse world. Skies are lowering with a summer rain’s incipience—there is no calm anymore that doesn’t come before the storm.

100 Words: Sound of a passing truck

Sound of a passing truck like a window shade drawing down on the day. Steady churn of the ceiling fan. One lamp’s skirt of yellow light. Every day shaves away another layer of integument—only later do we discover it to have been extraneous, with Emerson: It was caducous. One less layer of skin, one less defense; but also one more inch of distance from the stickiness of the world. Black comedy is the only news and to retreat, they say, is the only heroism. We live comfortably enough in midair, listening to the cries from street level. Don’t look down.

100 Words: I write with a hot hand

I write with a hot hand from coring and seeding peppers for tonight’s eggplant arrabiata, a cool breeze inserting itself between windows on adjacent walls. All day the sky seethed on the surface of water gone milky turquoise in the wake of repeated squalls of rain, simmering up steam from hot streets underneath the wheels of a bicycle. Work today, yes, forms of domestic harmony and strife, but the fundamentally pastoral nature of my pandemic experience pushes itself to the fore, in spite of the Cheeto Nazi invading every thought with his et in Arcadia ego, grotesque Trumpian I am.

100 Words: What do we remember

What do we remember on a day when the past is as elusive as the future and as unreal? Is it quantity or quality that turns Lisa into sacrifice? Today we knelt on the grass by the campus Shakespeare garden in full view of aggressive twisted blooming trees of magenta and of white, the white stalks of flowers bobbing like so many phalloi—tree full of dicks, we called it, half laughing and half sobbing, walled in by the moment that’s swallowed what we used to call time. The past isn’t past, yadda yadda. The touching tenderness of her time-traveling flesh.