Over and over again I bring the peach to my mouth,
the peach of thunder, the peach of bare necessities,
the peach of starry consolation, a singular path
of desire along my brain stem, the peach of my enemies
whose slights flyover like poisoned air, dark
as an ink blotter, or like honking geese whose blaring still
I welcome. Look at my cheekbones, wet and sticky
with the juice of living. What arrives as a riddle
to others cloudy mornings is merely the conundrum
I enter like a raft going downstream over rough waters.
Urban Renewal (cxii.)
Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. He is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.