WINNER OF THE 2019 SANDY CRIMMINS
NATIONAL PRIZE IN POETRY
Elegy For Breath
by Carlos Andres Gomez
Picture the adolescent: mimicking
what makes him worthy. Pick his
most potent snapshot for click-
bait: fresh-faced but mean-
mugging; same mask I’d pull
clean across my jaw for any
Polaroid of me & my best friend
in eighth grade. Let’s be clear: joke
stance—now used to justify
killing make just the just-
snuffed, just clumsy youth branded
bold-fonted & blood thirst. Peace
sign transmogrified to gang sign—
since the expert talking head
confirmed it. The expert talks &
confirms inside a rectangular frame
that renders most of him invisible.
Talks & confirms two bullet-
points from the bleached-
teeth interviewer. But nowhere
is the testimony of breath
stifled, the practiced hands that
remained watched whenever they
ascended, whether in prayer or
surrender, holding a bag of groceries,
a cell phone, or a son. Nowhere
is that last sigh freed from his tired
lungs as the sixth shot struck
the base of his skull sprinting
with back turned. The neighbor describes
that final sound I did not hear & yet
cannot unhear. It is suddenly the last
sound I hear from too many people
I love: my brother-in-law, my four
nephews, my high school best friend,
my infant son. (Every police officer
is out in the world defending
himself. Every one of them describes
the nightmares in which they see
a dark object against the darkness
that turns into fire & populates a rigid
void with lead. Every police officer
is a human being. He makes mistakes
sometimes. He got nervous. He thought
about his two kids & his pregnant wife,
it was fourteen days before retirement.
He’s never missed a Sunday at church.
Believe me, it’s true. I’ve seen him pass
the donation plate. Sometimes
he takes a naked, crumpled bill in his
calloused hands, wipes the sweat
& residue on his crotch.) I saw Jesus
on Easter Sunday still resting
on the wall, a hooded sweatshirt
draped across his torso from the college
he was to attend just to make it all a bit
more decent. Everything you stare into
becomes a fist, a loaded weapon aimed
at your face. I wake up in a country
based on a single document made
to protect every human being equally
who is a wealthy, white man. The woman
I meet after my show in Myrtle Beach,
South Carolina has no response when
I ask her why the killing of three dogs
made her protest, made her write letters,
made her boycott, while the murder
of a defenseless Black child inspired
not a single word from her lips?
Loud music; blocking the middle of an empty
residential street; a wallet in a trembling,
outstretched palm; a back sprinting away
in fear; a woman after a car accident
knocking on a door for help; a toy
rifle in a Walmart in Ohio; a boy
in Money, Mississippi, walking, lost
in thought, a stutter from Polio, a whistle
he learned to cope with his stammer,
when the implication of Blackness
is always absolution from murder.
My son’s first breath was with-
held: the cord that had nourished him
for nine months now choked three
times around his throat, as he fought
for life. Like his sister at birth. Like
the father on a sidewalk in Staten
selling cigarettes to support his six kids
to survive born fighting stayed fighting
to breathe. When my son gasped
finally & then slumbered into dream,
his blooming tenderness unguarded as
a single orchid, I said a silent prayer
for the imagined crimes his world was busy
inventing, to condemn him for being born
Black & having the courage to breathe.
Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet and the author of Hijito, selected by Eduardo C. Corral as the winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize. Winner of the 2018 Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, 2018 Sequestrum Editor’s Reprint Award in Poetry, 2015 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, BuzzFeed Reader, Rattle, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. For more, please visit: CarlosLive.com.