I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies
if you believe me to be your enemy know this I accept
I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies
after June Jordan
I am the least inimical thing on the wide promenades of Nagoya
kissing my lover in rush hour even the dead do not give a damn
imagine no one thinking our bodies were damaged dangerous
delirious I hold his hand never thinking I would
morning washed down the face of the buildings
like a blind man shaving rusty puddles and sunshine
in front of the starbucks and I am become the action of my fate
content with the minute rebellion of living comrade
if you believe me to be your enemy know this I accept
terrible revenge in merciless clots of love
blossoming by daylight fragrant by night if the knot
of our bodies is a burden know this you are burdened alone
in the wilds of our joy hunted by a kiss an animal frothed
I have not threatened your soft moments and yet you are threatened
Ryan Dzelzkalns has poems appearing with Assaracus, DIAGRAM, The Offing, The Shanghai Literary Review, Tin House, and others. He received an MFA from New York University and a BA from Macalester College where he was awarded the Wendy Parrish Poetry Prize. He has worked for the Academy of American Poets and was recently a Fulbright scholar in Tokyo, where he still lives. Read more at RyanDz.com
More by this author
A Letter to My Mother, or Ode to Invisible Things
Dear sudden inspiration, creeping uncertainty, tiny splinter of glass, / sometimes you cannot be enough.
More in this series
and though the odds say improbable
they ain’t superhuman. ain’t always able / to save the children the men the country or even your silk presses / but whatever they touch. somebody’s good god blesses.
Dark Blue
turn me into a place like home to you. / Say my name like the stars and / Let’s go out tonight.
Even When Looking Up, He Thinks He Is Above the Stars
The world was a changed thing / a variant of its former self, and you were / A new ripple in the miles-deep pool of time, / that one breath strumming the tender / Chords of the system.
