Get Access to Print and Digital for $23.99 per year.
Subscribe for Full Access
February 2025 Issue [Readings]

There Are More Ways to Show Devotion

From I’m Always Looking Up and You’re Jumping, which will be published next year by Random House.

 

At the end of my young boy’s gold

rope there was a gold bullet

at the end of the bullet

was my face golden wide and beaten

by a sky’s precious daggers

the preacher pressed palms

to my young boy’s forehead & held him

underneath water

at the end of the flood

the preacher says we all might see heaven

my young boy’s grandmother filled the tub that made her baby holy

& at the end of it all she became a god

on god

someone you dreamed of killing will outlive you

at the end of your clock a grandchild’s face will be turned

toward a blaring sun by hands you wanted cold

& lifeless in some years past & just that living child

squinting into the heat may grant you mercy

at the end of the line that leads to the gates

at the end of the flood we & all our animals walked

the wet earth by twos animal of fluorescent rage animal of boundless

grief animal of envy animal of greed two guns grazing its hip

at the end of my chain there are two flightless birds

at the end of the anguished birdcall there is a dying

country at the end of the bullet on my young boy’s chain

I resemble the unkillable

prayed for & never preyed on

I name the dying & the drowning & it never comes for me

put that on everything put that on my mother’s good name

put the flowers over the stone & let the seasons return them

to dust put that on my mother’s laugh on the symphony of her living

which now fades in & out of my memory like an old soul

song fighting through a radio’s static

put that on my mother holding her newborn son & turning his ear

toward a father’s mouth & the father singing a prayer

at the end of the prayer you begin dying or running

from dying at the end of your running the light bends

over the wet ground & the gold lashes your unburied face

On God, it will take more than water

 

After Tiona Deniece and Westside Gunn


| View All Issues | Next Issue >

February 2025

Close
“An unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out amid a homogenized media landscape.” —the New York Times
Subscribe now

Debug