Abracadabra, Sunshine

Dexter L. Booth

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781597094474
• eBook ISBN: 9781597092128
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Abracadabra, Sunshine is a series of ever-turning letters written to lovers, friends, and family as a testament to human perseverance and to art-making as a continuous defiance against the often overwhelming complexities and hardships of existence. Darting from the Czech Republic to the Andromeda Galaxy, from the films of Godard to the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, these poems foreground our animal need for love and connection against the background of our historical obsession with destruction. By turns dour and deeply hopeful, Booth’s poems extol the communal and healing powers of vulnerability and love.

I I

May 13, 2012

for Jordan

Today America wakes like a toddler,

rubbing the crust of Saturday from its eyes to find

forty-nine decapitated bodies along the road

to Nuevo Leon. Limbs in trash bags. 3:00 a.m.

sunlight sliding into the horizon.

I stand in the yard while a dragonfly

lands on the tip of my car antenna.

The bloody show begins,

again. Your wife is in labor.

There is no song to capture this day.

* * *

I go alone to water the vine tomatoes.

Heat has hugged the life from the leaves:

such accidents come from love.

One ripe and ruby-hued globe has survived,

hangs, a planet in a field of debris.

Soon the vines will be dust.

Summer starts the process

of slow devouring.

* * *

Everything changes: you tell me

you are transgender, your body and mind are

separate animals that cross paths, but do not touch.

What can you say to your wife, or to your mother

whose only word is no—

the socket of her mouth like a fist of coal,

burning deep inside your throat.

Perhaps I will meet a woman,

you say. She might be drunk

after half a glass of wine, laugh

at my jokes, smile with her whole face,

as real as the cracked dirt loaded over graves.

* * *

This time next week there will be an eclipse

like nothing we have seen since childhood.

The moon will shove its bald head between

us and the sun, stay lodged there for a lifetime

of breaths, as a secret . . .

And on the phone you’re saying her name:

Denise. The imaginary woman I’ll marry. She’ll tell me

I’m extremely sweet,

as the dark ingests the city and I reach for her hand.

Then in the pitch I’ll recall the end of “Happiness” by Robert Hass—

in bed kissing, / our eyes squinched up like bats

and I’ll forget her, and remember December,

my mother coming home, Christmas gifts from the church:

trash bags of dismembered doll parts, incomplete card decks,

crayons without names.

* * *

I will cry,

because even through a pinhole the moon will look like the head of a baby

crowning, the ring of blood like fire, a thing

dangerously fascinating to the eye. The baby will be jaundiced—

drink and cry and drink. I’ll drink and cry just the same.

All that blood, and more . . .

When I call my mother she reminds me

my grandmother has died. My cousin Shirley Mae

has died. Alexandra and Kyliyah Bain are alive, but

motherless, as we all eventually are, but

she has a boyfriend. My mother

no longer goes to bed alone. Though every morning

she calls and I am still her one son.

She limps to work

to push an elderly woman

who can no longer walk.

She limps to the post office, limps

to the mirror and ignores the conflicts of the body:

what she can no longer produce: hair,

teeth.

It was not until my grandmother died that I heard her say

she loved me, that I am still her only son,

her only boy.

* * *

Why does it feel so unnatural to be this—

not a father, not yet . . . not anymore . . .

I say parent and I watch you hold him,

I say Jonathan and I mean the person you used to be.

Already, your son reaches for your breasts

that are rising like heat off the pavement

at noon. You want to feed him. Your jaw is thinning.

People are asking questions, so you hide

like Apollo on the day of Phaethon’s death.

But the moon slides loose from the clouds—

a head rolling to the feet of an assassin,

smiling at this separation from the body,

this chance to become something new.

Even by Skin

I don’t use red ink on my students’ papers.

Though many words are misspelled.

I patiently explain how to conjugate verbs. I quote

Babel: “No iron spike can pierce a human heart

as a period in the right place.”

I tell them six months ago, an alcoholic tattooed Rilke

on my forearm. I couldn’t smell his breath

or see that he didn’t recognize the words,

kept his fist over the stencil until a fault was done.

What had he known of this elegy? He must have

mistaken the English for German. What else

could have explained the language of blood

raising error on the skin?

After Collaging Letters from Imaginary Girlfriends

After your mother

has counte...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• I
• I I
• I I I
• Notes on the Poems
• Biographical Note
• Back Cover