To Detroiters I Too May Have Called by the Wrong Names

To Detroiters I Too May Have Called by the Wrong Names Jamaal May (bio) Sorry. When I called you a graveyard,I meant your round, stone teethalways make me laugh.When I said you couldn’t touch meI meant, tag you’re it. Follow me! Follow me!I called you a tangle of vines becauseyou didn’t let me fallout of love with your hair. When I called you a land of too much sleep,I meant keep dreaming me upand I’ll keep dreaming of you.And since I can’t be anything but a mirrorfacing another mirror when I walk past a building,I have to stare into us rudely. You’re noseylike me, and curious like me,so you know I have to wander someand wonder morewhich holes need to be patchedand which are here to offer another view. I never meant to curse you with my dead,but since they’ll come for you anyway,family, may every ghost find youready to wrestle them into canvas or wood.May every haunting be a symphonyof wind through every hollowand every tree, and every cornerof every structure be a violin’s bridgeyou cross or burn, breathing like a vibrated note. [End Page 295] Sisters and brothers of the vibrato,of the backyard smoke, of the Nain Rouge,I know your kind of red, roja,how it blends impossibly with blue,how it smears the bruise of youto color an evening into the next sunrise purple.Mirror, last night you sleptand I became a camera in front of your film.Then a finger stepped on a guitar stringand an endless workday fell awayjust like that. A paintbrush spoke plainly to a hand.A mural crept up a wall without waking anyone,and a microphone trapped the sound of a sirenon a bedroom mixtape forever.Detroit, when I said you’re dreaming, I meant,you are dreaming. Keep making me up.When I said your pet phoenix was a bad omen,I should’ve said, I read way too many comic booksand I just wish it could breathe fire.I told you my back itches where the wings used to be,but I meant, will anyone still believe mewhen I whisper my song about flight? What I meant by, let the trappers come,was when they do, let thembring their most gilded cagesthat they might know there are birdsyes, but also, herethere be dragons—mad dragons, son.May your forked tonguesalways be surrounded by fire.Your wings a deafening applause.I’ve written your feathers across me,and now I marvel at your scales.May I always be infinitesimal and infinitein your belly. Swallow my whole heart whole.And when they come to defang you, Beast,Brother, Love, Sister, Art, City,may they find the streets jaggedwith the previous conquerors’ teeth. [End Page 296] Jamaal May JAMAAL MAY is a resident of Detroit, MI, where he has taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer. His first book, Hum, received the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award, and an NAACP Image Award nomination. Other honors include the Spirit of Detroit Award, the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and fellowships from Cave Canem, Frost Place, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Bucknell University, and Kenyon College, where he was named a 2014–2016 Kenyon Review Fellow. Some of his recent poems can be found in The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, Best American Poetry 2014, and the anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking/Penguin, 2015). A Graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA for Writers, he currently teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program, and co-directs the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook and Video Series with Tarfia Faizullah. Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

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