origin story

poems

Gary Jackson

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780826363015
• eBook ISBN: 9780826363022
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

origin story outlines a family history of distant sisters, grieving mothers and daughters, and alcoholic fathers. These poems take us from Kansas to Korea and back again in an attempt to reconnect with estranged family and familial ghosts divided by years of diaspora. An interrogation of cultural and personal myths, origin story wrestles with the questions: Who will remember us? How do we deal with the failures of memory? Whose stories are told?

IV

Run

The title is a lie: when I tell my wife I’m going for a run what I mean is that I’m going to walk under the hot South Carolina sun for only ten minutes, followed by a minute of actual running, then another ten minutes of walking, then more running, but mostly walking, and by now the sweat has formed a Rorschach mark on my chest and I hate it. Summers, I imagine the better me: the one who runs every morning, who writes all afternoon, who waits until evening to have his first drink. When I say I’m going to write, what I mean is that I’m not going to idle hours browsing blogs, cruising pornography while telling myself it’s all in service of the poem I’ll one day write on Mia Khalifa and how she was once ranked the #1 porn star in the country and received heaps of hate mail and death threats because she is Lebanese, and I’ll call this all research, but I won’t know what, exactly, to do with this, or how to put it in a poem, and I forgot to take that run. The run! I will kiss my wife and tell her if I’m not back in forty minutes, come look for me. A joke, when what I mean to say is that it will all be fine, except when the sun begins to set, and a car drives by a little too fast and too close, and my legs tell me my time is up. And now I hate the run, the street, the town, myself, the whole fucking state, and this country for making me feel this way every day I run.

Homecoming

I’m searching the used section. November

whips another flyer in the window

advertising Another Average Brass Band

playing at The Granada. A couple hurries inside

jacketed in leather, collars flipped up;

the bookish clerk mumbles hello

& everything feels like the season

has never changed. I pick up Camus,

a to-do list falls on dust & pine,

demanding: potatoes & salt,

dry-cleaned clothes, a paper

on Sisyphus, sex with Ryan.

The sun goes down right

on time. I smile too long

as the clerk gives me my change

& bags the beat-up copy of The Death

of Captain Marvel. Outside, the cold

slides a knife in my bones

& wakes me like it should

any creature. Get used to it,

I hiss between teeth, bite the frost

from my lip. If I could I’d devour

the winter. Every season, every

prairie & flint hill, every star

& leaping synapse demanding

remember the dog’s stupid look,

the countless phone calls,

my friend gone somewhere

I can’t won’t yet follow,

the service studded with strangers

wondering why I’m not there,

but shit—I’m here now, ain’t I?

With another day to kill, another bar to hit

before heading out tomorrow,

this comic my only souvenir.

The Restoration

We drank coffee and got ready,

listened to 93.3 during our commute

to take our mind off how

every day we die on TV. Every day

down the block, kids in surgical masks

spray-paint Magneto Was Right on street signs

and new storefronts waiting to redeem

spa-resort passes and avocado-toast dreams

until they, too, are forced out of business.

Or not. Motherfuckers can surprise you,

like beating cancer or criminal charges,

the 2016 election, the high cost

of middle-shelf liquor with a decent view.

If you want to succeed, let them see you

coming, our mothers once said before asking

if we wanted the switch or the belt.

But an ass-whooping beats sitting

at the rooftop bar looking over the steepled skyline

and feeling the pang of worlds we’d rather be,

with two empty seats right beside us

that stay empty for the next two hours,

surrounded by people drinking & eating

standing up—the wind threatening

to blow their hats off their sunburned heads.

Somewhere right now

there are two people looking for those seats.

We keep hoping they’ll find them—

find us. Let’s have another drink,

watch the muted news above

a row of decent bourbon,

wait to hear, to see

if they make it to us or turn up on TV.

Ode working twice as hard for fathers and Johnnie Walker

I drank that blue a while back, but I give you

some black, give you some gold,

while my mother, bored...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on “Interview featuring . . .” Poems
• holoprosencephaly (hŏl’ō-prŏs’ěn-sěf ’ə-lē)
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• Interview featuring thanksgiving
• Notes
• Acknowledgments