Last Days

Tamiko Beyer

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781948579407
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Last Days is a practice of radical imagination for our current political and environmental crises. It excavates the conditions that have brought us here—white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, corporate power, capitalism—and calls ancestors, birds, organizers, and lovers to conjure a new world. It explores how to transform our future to be more beautiful, more just, and more compassionate than we can imagine.

LAST DAYS

One

safe is an interpretation —Kate Greenstreet

We didn’t expect the eagerness that filled us on the last days of empire. For what, we couldn’t exactly say.

Metal glistened on the streets in the hot September days. The sun no longer a dandelion; the sun most definitely a muzzle. When it set, the Corporation—keen to kill the dark—flipped the switch.

Then, the marble facades of buildings were suddenly up-lit, streetlights swirled incandescent, and thousands of people hurtled through the furnace of synthesized

laughter, pop songs, and an unlimited desire for all.

///

Some of us were on the edges, blocking out the canned sounds and lights as best we could. Building something new, something old. We could feel the northern half of our planet begin to tilt away from the sun.

I am on the cusp of change, and the curve is shifting fast.

It was an experience and then it was a memory. And then a system of belief, a way to navigate the dissolving world.

I wanted to become more salt wind, less reflection. To become quiet enough to hear the ancestors.

ANCECSTORCHORUS:

Find the source at the underwater

roots, at the mudline:

fragile strands of a new language

among cattails and seed casings.

Trust the fibers

will lean in the right direction,

will not mislead you.

Child, we have always laid

one strand over, then under the next,

over and under, over and under—

until something like true

meaning emerges from the twist

of our fingers. This basket

is for you: an exhortation, a map.

Soon you will need to reach

all of us in this river of time

with the truest sentences

you can weave.

There were five of us in that small apartment, hauling water, coding and decoding, soldering metal, constructing strategies, drafting poems. I lifted heavy objects and learned to stitch up an open wound.

I no longer thought of myself as a girl. I was often afraid. At the same time, I glistened in the everyday fever brought on by Wave’s eyes opening, the morning sky breaking.

When we met, Wave said holding on was dangerous. The taste of hope could make us reckless. I knew what she meant, but despite ourselves, I came to love how she tasted more than I loved any fruit on my tongue.

ANCESTORCHORUS:

Light breaks the glass

separating you

from the present.

The dangerous words

chime in the wind, spike into sand and grass.

Behold the other kind of blade:

power of seed turned blossom, turned fruit.

In the afternoons we would cross the river on the train, skimming ancient tracks into the center of the city where things were bought and sold on a grand scale. We slid into the gaps of commerce, knowing all warfare is based on deception.

So many people were building scaffolding against crumbling structures, using incantations from their fathers as mortar.

But some attempted to excavate the signals buried deep within their bodies; some tried to listen to their heartbeats.

Those were the ones we were looking for. We slipped them a scrap of paper, then dissolved back into the crowd.

ANCESTORCHORUS:

Words can obscure like clouds or reveal like the tidal pull. Do you remember rain?

The state of emergency is also always the state of emergence. Where does the water go when ocean draws out its lowest tide?

When the new recruits followed the poem to find us, we put them to work or gave them maps to others in need of their skills. We were hundreds of loose groups across the country, fashioning transformation out of starlight and strategy, spindrift and solidarity.

///

I was impatient for the waking, the sharp sensation of light and promise. I thought I understood.

But there was still so much to learn. Wave reminded me of the libraries they had shut down years ago, their floors like silk, books heavy with promise. That’s where we went: picking the locks, scraping away the dust, memorizing what we could.

Power grids, water-sewer lines, and fiber-optic cables snaked their way across the city. We became deft in mapping and coordinates, diversion and distraction. We discovered the patterns the Corporation relied on, found the back doors, planted the traps with care.

Creating new economies in the heart of capital required cunning and poetic imagination. We knew we were being watched when the NICE drones paused above our fire escape.

But cooking and dancing were not yet crimes. We could plan just as well stirring the pot in three-four time as in stillness around the kitchen table.

Patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. We hummed and we sang. We simmered soup and kneaded flour and water. We mapped out the next tactics.

Two

The body, with its arms up, is a kind of miracle —Aracelis Girmay

We knew it would change and it did. Mostly we were prepared for it, but the cold policing still struck us hard.

We got the warning just in time from Roe down at the bodega. The cops were sawing at the heavy chains across the door downstairs.

I strapped the typewriter to my back, and Wave gathered up her colored notebooks as the cops’ boots thundered up the stairwell.

The kitchen window jammed.

Wave heaved her shoulder under the sash and it budged a few more inches. Terra and May slid out, scaled down the fire escape. Wave followed, but when I tried the typewriter got wedged, and I couldn’t move.

The Corporate police battered their rifle butts at the door we had reinforced with steel months ago. Wave put her arms around my ribs and pulled. I toppled out, our arms tight around each other.

We shimmied down the rope and traveled fast, out of the city’s most rumbling sections.

Terra and May went south, across the harbor. Roe stayed to break the code. Wave and I ran tight together, broadcasting alarm signals over encrypted channels.

We spoke the words, leaning into dangerous conversations. We knew there was at least one spy among us, but we had to take the risk.

ANCESTORCHORUS:

Say a name

and see its familiar

float by.

The present was a sheet of glass suspended in midair.

We loosened our fists, wiped down the sweat, then gripped again. We became intimately familiar with our weapons and the soles of our feet, with ghost as a verb.

We walked north, mostly on frontage roads. Even though we had been preparing all this time, we had thought somehow it might turn out differently.

But we were que...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• What It Means to Be Human
• Tankas for What Comes Together
• Estuary
• Solstice
• We Are Bodies in Bodies We Are Stars
• Unravel All Systems Go
• Wintering
• Call It
• COVID-19 Triptych
• Tankas for What Comes Together
• Equinox
• Anchor in the Mud
• Correct Pronunciation
• Generations
• What the Grandmothers Say
• Last Days
• Tankas for What Comes Together
• Experiment in Revolution, 2016
• Solstice
• Blue Passport
• Root and Rise
• Experiment in Revolution, 2020
• 21st Century Fable
• Sweet Branch Stitched to Bitter Tree
• Subterranean Haibuns
• Open
• I Vow to Be the Small Flame
• Tankas for What Comes Together
• [ ]
• The Flood
• Equinox
• Genesis: Featherling
• Murmuration
• Birds of a Feather
• Notes and Acknowledgments