Made to Explode
Poems
SANDRA BEASLEY
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For the grandmothers
Contents
HEIRLOOM
ELEPHANT
LONG JOHN SILVER’S
THE CONVERSATION
WINTZELL’S OYSTER HOUSE
NOSTALGIA
WE GOT AN A—
MONTICELLO PEACHES
TOPSY TURVY
MY WHITENESSES
BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE
***
WEAK OCEAN
THE SNIPER DANCE
KISS ME
JEFFERSON, MIDNIGHT
LINCOLN, MIDNIGHT
CHERRY TREE REBELLION
ROOSEVELT, MIDNIGHT
EINSTEIN, MIDNIGHT
TITANIC, MIDNIGHT
AMERICAN ROME
***
PIGS IN SPACE
BILOXI BACON
RHYMES WITH
STILL LIFE WITH SEX
HAINS POINT
WINTER GARDEN PHOTOGRAPH
CARD TABLE
IN PRAISE OF PINTOS
THE VOW
LITTLE LOVE POEM
***
DEATH BY CHOCOLATE
AN ACCOMMODATION
INTERSECTIONALITY
CUSTOMER SERVICE IS
SAY THE WORD
POP
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH GEORGE CATLIN
BASS PRO SHOPS
NON-COMMISSIONED: A QUARTET
LAZARUS
EPIC
Acknowledgments
Made to Explode
HEIRLOOM
Lo, twelve children born to a woman named Thankful
in Nampa, by the border between Oregon
and Idaho, or as it will be remembered: Ore-Ida.
Lo, two of her sons drive to Miami
not knowing if their plan will work.
Lo, what were once waste scraps fed to the cows
now repackaged—the fry shavings sliced, spiced, and oiled.
Lo, a chef at the Fountainebleau takes the bribe.
Lo, Tater Tots are dished onto the tables
of the 1954 National Potato Convention and soon,
enshrined in the freezers of America. Three decades later,
the golden age of my childhood is a foil-lined tray
plattered with Ore-Ida product, maybe salt, maybe
nothing but hot anticipation of my fingertips.
Lo, my mother is a great cook and Lo,
my grandmother is a terrible one, but on tinfoil plains
they are equal. I need you to understand
why my father will never enjoy an heirloom tomato
glistening, layered in basil. Put away your Brandywines,
your Cherokee Purples, your Green Zebras.
Lo, as with spinach, as with olives, he tastes only
the claustrophobia his mother unleashed from cans
to feed four children on a budget. We talk little of this.
Lo, what is cooked to mush.
Lo, what is peppered to ash. Lo, the flavor
rendered as morning chore—that this, too, is a form of love.
ELEPHANT
On the Route 7 strip,
next to the office supply store,
next to the pool supply store,
next to the Tower Records,
next to the T.J. Maxx,
the Ranger Surplus lurked
where I shopped only
at the edges: iron-on patches,
all-weather lighters,
vintage plate pin-ups,
never venturing into the groin
of camouflage and camping gear,
until I began buying weapons
including a mace, a chained flail,
several throwing stars, and the book
Contemporary Surveillance Techniques,
with its cover art showing a man
crouched in a stereo speaker,
all gifts for my father,
because what do you get the man
who has everything—and by everything
I mean a large-caliber shell casing
upright and decorative
in the living room, where you might
expect a potted ficus to be—
and these, too,
were the years he gave me
T-shirt after T-shirt, souvenirs
of every posting and deployment,
including the one that said
Hard Rock Cafe Baghdad—
Closed—Kuwait, Now Reopening—
T-shirts that fit poorly
over my new breasts, boxy,
unflattering, and so I shut them
away in drawers again
and again, each of us
trying to say to the other
I see you,
the way a blindfolded man
takes the tail into his hands, believing
from this he can see the elephant.
LONG JOHN SILVER’S
Once again at the Long John Silver’s of 1988
the rope-slung walkway seems to sway under my feet
as I look up at the Cape Cod with its steepled roof,
trimmed in yellow, and lean my whole weight
to the wrought-iron sword that serves as a door handle.
At the counter, I order a fish fillet
served in a folded paper Treasure Chest with
a handful of fries to hide the Secret Compartment;
hold the hush puppies, corn cob on the side.
I carry the blue plastic tray with care to a booth
paneled in the mahogany of an officer’s quarters,
then sit on a bench vinyled like a nautical flag.
The batter is always fluffy with club soda
and here, no one has died yet.
My teeth cut a smile into the Icelandic cod,
and perhaps I will go back to order a chicken plank
or a tray of crunchies swept from fryer’s belly,
which they will give me for free.
When I look back on all that I’ve done, I want
to be the person stubborn enough to found a chain
of Seafood Shoppes in Lexington, Kentucky,
five hundred miles from any ocean,
named for a character in a Scottish novel.
I want to admit I’m doubled over and howling,
yet reach up to ring the Captain’s Bell on my way out.
THE CONVERSATION
Fireflies, Col. Glenn calls them—
banging the capsule’s wall to prove
their movement. This
will be the gesture Hollywood
claims as history—how space
dazzles even the seasoned airman,
maddens like Titania’s touch.
The movie version sees
what he sees: Florida yawn, Delta yawp,
a sunrise inside every hour,
lightning over the Indian Ocean.
Yet the operatic soundtrack, paced
in gilded silence, is not what he hears.
Wonder-ese is not the language
he speaks. For this,
we turn to the transcript. Pilot
to Cap Com; Cap Com to Pilot.
This is Friendship 7, going to manual.
Ah, Roger, Friendship 7.
Pilot, Texas Cap Com, Cape Canaveral.
Cap Coms chiming in from Canary,
Canton, Hawaii, Zanzibar, India,
Woomera: every visual check
on the gyros, inverter temp,
every correction to pitch and yaw,
fuel, oxygen, Ah, Roger, Ah, Over.
Say again your instructions please.
Over. Do you read? Stand by.
You can be honest. This
is Godspeed-less, workaday chatter.
But in these pages
my grandfather lives forever—
a Navy captain charged
with Glenn’s vitals, stretching
his stethoscope across 162 miles
and eighteen tracking stations.
I hear him in each pressure check.
I see him biting his lip,
leaning toward a bank of dials
while the retropackage breaks, burns.
No one knows if the heat shield
will hold. Captain Pruett
goes unnamed. This
is how history claims us:
not in the gesture of one but
in the conversation of many,
the talk that gets the job done.
We climb into the syrup-can capsule
to circle the Earth three times.
The miraculous swarm,
we will realize,
is condensation. The light
blinks at us,
flake and ice of our own breath.
WINTZELL’S OYSTER HOUSE
Before six seats and a trough of oysters,
before J. Oliver slathers the wall in homespun,
Charles W. Peters sells squash here, and canned beans;
he sells bed frames & dressers & side tables;
insurance against rising waters;
he sells whatever will send nine daughters and sons
through college. In 1891, a Black man
can build two stories of clapboard for $2,000,
can aspire to his own furniture company,
can preside over the Mutual Aid Association,
can march with 4,000 men and four brass bands
under the Emancipation League’s auspices.
He builds two blocks from the Creole Fire Station,
which keeps fast horses, racetrack rejects,
because the first fire-truck to arrive on the scene
is the only one whose men get paid.
Fifty-some years later, a merchant marine
offered West Indies by way of Mobile:
crab lumped, layered in fine-chopped onion
& the kiss of Wesson oil,
& the slap of iced water & how God
means for salad to be served, on a saltine.
We chow down in the last all-wood joint on Dauphin.
The secret is in the cider vinegar, how
a hundred jaws of minor angels macerate the haul.
NOSTALGIA
An adult shad has 1,300 bones,
but that’s not why I always order it:
I remember fingers of white flesh, flaky-fried,
or a sac of red roe slapped into a pan
with a pat of butter,
and I think of camping by the James River,
how the sky yawned and hollered.
I once loved a band named Emmet Swimming.
I got lost in a crowd of teenagers
inscribing each other’s yearbooks in blue Bic ink,
working hard for a house with fake wood trim,
singing that it’s a long way down,
wondering how long it’d been since I’d been good.
We were sweat-sweet and dancing.
We paid what we could afford at the door.
Two decades later, I read the band named themselves
for Emmett Till.
The lead singer says the name means
a fourteen-year-old should be swimming in the river,
not dying in it.
They spelled his name wrong and,
once they realized that,
they kept spelling his name wrong.
I’ve got 1,290 pin bones to go.
WE GOT AN A—
We your friends.
We the Virginians.
We the northern Virginians.
We the eleventh grade.
We the choir parties.
We the Madonna sing-alongs.
We the third-period U.S. History.
We the antebellum economies.
We the Sunday, the Doritos and Jolt.
We the directors.
We the script.
We the farmers.
We the farmers’ wives.
You, we decide,
should play the cotton picker.
You who vogues best of any of us.
You stand in the closet
with a Tylenol bottle, teasing
puffs of white from its open mouth.
We your friends.
We the northern Virginians.
We the Virginians.
We the video camera, waiting.
We who swear This Will Be Hilarious.
The door opens. The skit begins.
MONTICELLO PEACHES
Jefferson planted over a thousand trees
in the South Orchard—eighteen varieties of apple,
six apricot, four nectarine,
and thirty-eight types of peach.
Lemon Cling. Heath Cling. Indian Blood Cling.
Vaga Loggia. Breast of Venus,
which Jefferson accounted for as the “teat peach”—
interlopers mistaken as indigenous.
Each cleft globe was a luxury,
yet so abundant they were sliced, chipped,
boiled, brandied, fried, sun-dried,
and extras fed to the hogs.
My first wish is that the labourers
may be well treated,
the Master wrote.
He created a system for tipping.
Once, James Hemings was whipped
three times over before the sun had set
behind Brown’s Mountain.
When Jefferson traveled to Paris
in 1784, he took Sally and her brother—
James, who learned the language,
who trained at pasta and pastry,
paid four dollars per month to serve
as chef de cuisine to the Minister to France.
James, who had to be coaxed to leave
a country where, in 1789,
slavery had been abolished.
I hereby do promise & declare
until he shall have taught such person
as I shall place under him for that purpose
to be a good cook, this previous condition
being performed,
he shall thereupon be made free . . .
“For that purpose”: their brother, Robert.
In 1796, James was freed.
In 1801, James killed himself.
In 1802, Robert debuted macaroni pie
on the menu for Jefferson’s state dinner.
In 1824, a recipe layering pasta, cheese, and butter
appears in The Virginia Housewife: Or, Methodical Cook,
alongside Mrs. Mary Randolph’s marmalade
that specifies a pound of West Indies sugar
to two pounds of peaches—“yellow ones
make the prettiest”—and a hard chop
until flesh gives away to transparent pulp,
chilled to a jelly.
If one was accused of stealing or eating
beyond one’s share
the grill was secured
over the mouth.
This was considered the kind muzzle.
The unkind one settled an iron bit
over the tongue.
The groundskeepers knew we’d come
with our wreath to lay at Jefferson’s grave,
walking Monticello’s grass at misted dawn,
half-drunk and laughing.
We came every year.
There are two types of peaches:
one to which the stone clings,
shredding to wet threads,
and another allowed to lift clean.
“Freestone,” they call those peaches—
<
br /> that most popular variety, the White Lady.
TOPSY TURVY
A style of doll original to plantation culture
and mass-manufactured well into the twentieth century,
later reworked to feature fairy-tale characters.
Lovable Topsy, charming Eva,
the adaptable pattern:
Little Red Riding Hood
with stitch-mouth, her big eyes,
her gingham apron. Flip her,
reverse her skirts—
one face covered, another bared—
now she’s Grandmother
with perched glasses, mob cap.
Yank and tuck the elastic,
fussing the cap back and down
to cover Grandma’s face,
and where her silvering bun
might be, he waits:
Turn me up / And turn me back,
I once was white / And now am black.
What good is a tale,
I was taught,
without the Big Bad Wolf?
His pointed ears, his fangs,
his expanse of charcoal
and slavering pup-tongue.
Little flip-figure, little relic.
Give him a howl.
In the toy basket one day
& one day & one day & one day
& Where did this come from?
& then the doll was gone.
MY WHITENESSES
Whiteness as my body’s
spent currency:
hair that holds no melanin,
which I pluck out;
an overlong fingernail
that I tear away;
what once blistered,
collapsed flat to my heel.
And what then?
Skin picked, flicked
under my bed—
strands dropped to tile—
the keratin crescents folded,
tucked in couch-crevice.
My performative strip
of self, still
trashing up the place.
Down by Richmond,
how you pronounce a thing
sets stake in the land.
Do you elaborate
a tribe’s Pow-hite?
Or does 300 years
of muscle memory
guide the tongue?
Po’ white Creek.
Po’ white Parkway.
One man uses cracker
as absolution,
as proof of brotherhood,
while another uses cracker
because someone,
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