No map or directions

"No map or directions"* Dawn Lundy Martin (bio) . . . Or forest or company. Or other unchecked situations. As a result, some heretofore unknown architecture in place of our weapons of security? All expertise slips off the ledge. Deception is often a reciprocal activity. When desire is not produced by what you don't have. What happens in the space between the figure and what is cast. When I'm a woman there are all these women saying opening is very transgressive. In any event, the car needed jumper cables and I had some. All pissy and seething on the side of the road it was. It didn't work, in the end. What it must be like wearing a sweatshirt on a deck in the middle of July. Shedding a prescribed melancholy right in front of everyone. I mumbled some names under my breath. Months of not giving into it, and then without warning on full blast.So easy. Moths not giving in, escaping into wingfly like shadows. Of reticence and maybe October. October seems like light years away. We'd be excellent martyrs, you and I. A proximity so close you can touch it. [End Page 20] Everyone's leaning into fist, hard, pressing on it and everyone's saying Like a Kamikaze takes flight!, and we're all sifting down to earth in these small significant bits, hamming it up trying to make ourselves larger, and we're laughing. If I had a father I'd say Dad. My God, every morning before morning we wake and wonder why we're awake. In this kind of purgatorial rage. Roar is an instinct I can't get out of. Right smack in the middle I hear someone say something about love and there are only fleeting attempts at annihilation. I love you says the voice. I don't care how sentimental this all is. [End Page 21] Dawn Lundy Martin Dawn Lundy Martin, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, is author of DISCIPLINE (2011), A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007), a chapbook The Morning Hour (2003), and a chaplet The Undress. Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and May Sarton Prize for Poetry are a few of her awards and recognitions. She is a founding member of the Black Took Collective, a performance group of experimental black poets, and a founder of the Third Wave Foundation in New York. Footnotes * From an email correspondence. Copyright © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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