Leila Jackson

Written in honor of Juneteenth, 2024

405?

No: 405. It’s no question. I know you, 405, your trace, your teeth. You look like 404, but I feel you, quietly taking his place in my bones. So how’s about we start off with a toast, to you and me, then? You’re no secret, 405; you could be my greatest joy, how you warm and stretch me like new clay. It was 404 who faced me forward, and it’s you, now, who straightens my spine.

Let’s try again. She comes on a bike. She comes dressed in black, or—better—midnight blue. The bike is shiny, silver, scary. Not scary. A little scary, but you’d never admit it. She serves four. She serves eight. She serves as many as can fit around your dining room table. She built that table. Or so she says.

The same thing that makes a rat a rat and not a knotweed,
scampering across the third rail at Downtown Crossing.
He is after a half-eaten BLT that somebody has flung
between the tracks. And one of his front teeth is chipped
and he is winning. The thing that makes a knotweed
spread its thighs out west until its veins can supply a body,
then another. What makes a horse a horse if not
the gleeful declaration of such from the seventh train window
that day? There can only be so many poems about
staring Barrels down. A country only being a country at gunpoint
or between the coal-laden tracks of work boots. Instead:
a country is a country because I say so. Because I hold your hand
while waiting for the train and when you reach for my waist
I can think myself a rat stumbling upon a rare feast.
Because when we leave the station the snow will be gray
and falling in lazy circles from the low-hung clouds
like the ash that follows some great fire—
but still, I know we’ll stick our tongues out to catch the flakes
like the small things we are.

after Tracy K. Smith

What do you have to say for yourself?
Where are the keys? Why do you shake?
Who do you hope to feed with this sweat?
Who are you fueling? With my hands
behind my back, can you guess the lucky fist?
What does your body have to say for itself?
And its body? And the one after that?
Where do you come from? Where are you going?
How far back was the greenhouse? How far
forward is the graveyard? With your hands behind
your back, can you make a fist? Can you reach
the glove box? Whose beating heart do you hope
to kill with this sweat? One of us always tells the truth.
The other one is driving.

Let us begin, first, with the heart–a monster

of a thing. An elephant’s is the size