The Big Book of Exit Strategies

Jamaal May

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781938584244
• eBook ISBN: 9781938584367
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Praise for Jamaal May:

"Linguistically acrobatic [and] beautifully crafted.... [Jamaal May's] poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel."— Publishers Weekly

Following Jamaal May's award-winning debut collection, Hum (2013), these new poems explore parallel landscapes of the poet's interior and an insidious American condition. Using dark humor that helps illuminate the pains of maturity and loss of imagination, May uncovers language like a skilled architect—digging up bones of the past to expose what lies beneath the surface of the fragile human condition.

From: "Ask Where I've Been":

Ask about the tornado of fists.
The blows landed. If you can
watch it all—the spit and blood frozen
against snow, you can probably tell
I am the too-narrow road winding out
of a crooked city built of laughter,
abandon, feathers and drums.
Ask only if you can watch streetlights bow,
bridges arc, and power lines sag,
and still believe what matters most
is not where I bend
but where I am growing.

Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, Michigan, where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, the Believer, NER, and the Kenyon Review. May has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press.

A Brief History of Hostility

In the beginning

there was the war.

The war said let there be war

and there was war.

The war said let there be peace

and there was war.

The people said music and rain

evaporating against fire in the brush

was a kind of music

and so was the beast.

The beast that roared

or bleated when brought down

was silent when skinned

but loud after the skin

was pulled taut over wood

and the people said music

and the thump thump

thump said drum.

Someone said

war drum. The drum said war

is coming to meet you in the field.

The field said war

tastes like copper,

said give us some more, said look

at the wild flowers our war plants

in a grove and grows

just for us.

Outside sheets are pulling

this way and that.

Fields are smoke,

smoke is air.

We wait for fingers to be bent

knuckle to knuckle,

the porch overrun

with rope and shotgun

but the hounds don’t show.

We beat the drum and sing

like there’s nothing outside

but rust-colored clay and fields

of wild flowers growing

farther than we can walk.

Torches may come like fox paws

to steal away what we plant,

but with our bodies bound

by the skin, my arc to his curve,

we are stalks that will bend

and bend and bend…

fire for heat

fire for light

fire for casting figures on a dungeon wall

fire for teaching shadows to writhe

fire for keeping beasts at bay

fire to give them back to the earth

fire for the siege

fire to singe

fire to roast

fire to fuse rubber soles to collapsed crossbeams

fire for Gehenna

fire for Dante

fire for Fallujah

fire for readied aim

fire in the forge that folds steel like a flag

fire to curl worms like cigarette ash

fire to give them back to the earth

fire for ancient reasons: to call down rain

fire to catch it and turn it into steam

fire for churches

fire for a stockpile of books

fire for a bible-black cloak tied to a stake

fire for smoke signals

fire to shape gun muzzle and magazine

fire to leap from the gut of a furnace

fire for Hephaestus

fire for pyres' sake

fire licking the toes of a quiet brown man

fire for his home

fire for her flag

fire for this sand, to coax it into glass

fire to cure mirrors

fire to cure leeches

Fire to compose a nocturne of cinders

fire for the trash cans illuminating streets

fire for fuel

fire for fields

fire for the field hand's fourth death

fire to make a cross visible for several yards

fire from the dragon's mouth

fire for smoking out tangos

fire to stoke like rage and fill the sky with human remains

fire to give them back to the earth

fire to make twine fall from bound wrists

fire to mark them all and bubble black

any flesh it touches as it frees

They took the light from our eyes. Possessive.

Took the moisture from our throats. My arms,

my lips, my sternum, sucked dry, and

lovers of autumn say, Look, here is beauty.

Tallness only made me an obvious target made of

off-kilter limbs. I’d fall either way. I should get a

to-the-death tattoo or metal ribbon of some sort.

War took our prayers like nothing else can,

left us dumber than remote drones. Make

me a loyal soldier and I’ll make you a

lamenting so thick, metallic, so tank-tread-hard.

Now make tomorrow a gate shaped like a man.

I can’t promise, when it’s time, I won’t hesitate,

cannot say I won’t forget to return in fall and

guess the names of the leaves ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Ask Where I’ve Been
• There Are Birds Here
• Ode to the White-Line-Swallowing-Horizon
• Things That Break
• As the Saying Goes
• FBI Questioning During the 2009 Inauguration
• Conducting Ivy with the Girl Down the Street
• From The Big Book of Exit Strategies
• The Gun Joke
• Hoplophobia
• A Brief History of Hostility
• The Unseen Hand of Zombie Jesus
• Open Mouth Requiem
• Petrified at the End of All Things
• Yes, I Know She’s Dying
• Mouth
• Love Poem Moving Back and Forth Across Glass
• Make Believe
• Per Fumum
• I Have This Way of Being
• Respiration
• Ruin
• The Tendencies of Walls
• Megalophobia
• Intake in the Ward
• The Hollow Made by Her Open Fist
• It Shakes Us Still
• The Whetting of Teeth
• Sugar
• Death Scene in a Psychiatric Ward
• Behind the Ward
• Ode to Forgetting
• Better Devices
• God of the Ocean of Lumber
• Water Devil
• Little Design
• The Spirit Names of Stolen Books
• History as Road Trip from Detroit to Mississippi
• To Detroiters I Too May Have Called by the Wrong Names
• Exit Interview
• In the Future You Will Be Your Own Therapist
• Your Life Prepared You for a Career in Film
• Parallel Existence
• Dare
• Shift
• Bad Day
• For Years You Trained for Being Lost at Sea
• Unsigned Letter to a Human in the 21st Century
• Letter to Mathew Olzmann Regarding Sirens and Shipwrecks
• This is How I Know It Might Work
• Against Against
• And for My Last Trick
• Recent Titles from Alice James Books
• About the Publisher