The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

Not sisters. High-intensity mutual exclusion.

This was another kind of poetry theatric: If you just said enough names, people assumed you knew what you were talking about and tended to attribute the vagueness of the reference to their own ignorance.

That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling.

There was the duress. The transubstantiation of the real thing into something so freighted with meaning that it collapsed in on itself.

This too was a performance, but he considered it morally acceptable because he knew it was a performance.

Both because there was no point to the argument and because the truth did not change the material reality of what had happened to this place and to these people. The names, really—the names of history—did not matter. The who did what to whom and when. Petty facts and details. But when you were in it. Before the present became the past and before the past became history, when it was your family going hungry or your town losing their jobs, getting wrung out, it didn’t matter if you got the blame pinned on the right son of a bitch.

“And do what, boy? You ain’t seen the world yet. How you know you wanna give it up and you ain’t seen nothing?”