"The Crime", Miguel Barretto García
after Hanif Abdurraqib
A poem begins not when the line
breaks but where the skull scatters.
Tea pot petals in the kitchen. Ai Weiwei
smashing an urn. Ah ma left
to pick herself up in the Bay Area streets.
Fragments do not pick themselves up. They are
swept away. Left unnoticed until the sun
pricks the eye. Only then heads look
down and see an archipelago
of canes, grocery bags, rolling mandarins, still
bodies. The poet is a bystander
standing beside security guards in a shopping mall,
sitting beside New York subway commuters. The poet
Is a crime: complicity only more evident
The more I write and the less I write.
The poet is dealt with an impossible hand
and the poem reflects into the mirror as kaleidoscope—
fragments containing smaller bodies, bordered by
the shatter and missing shard. What the poem sees
are many fractured bone manifesting in America’s festering—
The residue and debris left
suspended in the air of villages, men, women, children.
Forgotten. The poet waits until the tea is steep. It fogs
the mirror like Ah ma’s fogging memory or history
books leaving out detail for the imagination. Without witnesses,
our stories are only fiction. The poet goes to
excavate their home inside their mouth and burnt lip.
The poem calls it home, even though home sounds
foreign. Mother tongue slipping in the mud,
while bombs were seeding rice paddies
and English was growing in our mouths. The poet
is aware of the irony of a poem written in English.
The poet concedes not doing enough
to pick up the language broken when spoken,
to pick up the mother or father broken in the streets.
But Mother tongue speaks. Curses. Fights.
Back when the poet was a recluse
and the poem was a witness, the village
was a kingdom and the archipelago
was an archipelago. Beaches thrived with trading ships
from Canton to Cebu. They exchanged
Thai silk, Mindanao gold, Ming porcelain ceramics,
Han urns, Moluccan spices, Fujian tea leaves,
Cebuano mother-of-pearl. Their skin was even
poetry, writing their honours, virtues,
and ancestors into tattoos. They were not
a race, but civilisation refusing erasure.
The poet fills the poem until margins are capsized
With letters, until ink becomes the dye
of bartered fabric. The poet lies
a truth. The poem calls fiction, history.