they said. He said, It
looked like a demon. It
charged [him], like [he] was five, It
Hulk Hogan—
two legacies
ghost-stenciled into concrete, one shadow
sifted into ash. He sleeps at night—No
regrets. His family certain as the closed lid
of a coffin
they will be safe.
It happened, he says, It was
unfortunate. It is
what It is.
Which is the invisible
legacy—
eighteen years of a boy’s
stifled blush, choreography
of a scowl with index and middle
salute, sinew flung forward, barrel
chest soft as unmixed concrete, whiskerless
chin line. His crown was bursting
forth and bowed, inverted king
posing for a peon graced with steel, skull
twice knighted by fire. The final blade
of light cut endless through the high
frequency shrill that fluttered
from his mouth, dull thud from the brim
of a broached squeal. Because child. Because
scared. Because tired. The boy was tired
of being shadow, dust film on boot
lip, wanted to be luminous. Sometimes a life
splinters to break. To scatter.
To be.
*
I see my nephew pressed to the edge
of boyhood, though he looks a man
in my imagination with his flinch
and blush muted, he is still now
carved raw from the giggle that over-
takes his toddler body. Thomas
the Tank Engine is this moment’s alibi
for letting go. As I watch him now
I see him still in that faded cobalt,
whale-imprinted bib he kept soaked
through but, also, I see the son I have
planned for, knowing there is no plan.
The nights accrue
like gravestones in a tiny plot of land like light-
less hallways that encircle the earth, an end-
less tether that yokes the crisp dusk from each
day as it is drained of light, what can never
be seen cast against what can never be
unseen. The promises made against
that other unspoken promise, grief
made invisible beneath the shadow
of something too large to see, how all
our children share the same erased
name because of it, what leaves them
riddled with everything they cannot see:
piercing & rigid & always more
weight than anyone predicts, & the child
still in the street. It is two minutes and a few
seconds past noon on Canfield Drive
in Ferguson, Missouri and he is still
right there, in the middle
of the street, not my nephew. Not my
son.
Carlos Andrés Gómez is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Winner of the 2015 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in the North American Review, Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Muzzle, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (MTV Books, 2012), and elsewhere. For more, please visit www.CarlosLive.com.