My people

Six weeks left in Chicago. Three times I got on the bus. The bus is a metaphor, except when it isn't. Plus a perfect poem by Charif Shanahan.

Few years ago, I was cold and waiting at the bus stop for a bus that never came. It was early April and an ugly morning. I was headed east, toward Lake Michigan, to see Emmy, who lives downstairs now, but for a while, lived out there, in a direction I don’t often go, but would happily for Emmy. She takes good, loving care of her self and her home. I love being with what’s been well-cared for.  

emmy makes everything beautiful

But the bus never came and the sky was sunless and I didn’t have any socks on. The next bus wasn’t due—if it didn’t disappear—for another twenty minutes. And Emmy and me, we’ve been friends for a bit, so it didn’t feel great but it did feel reasonable to bail, to text her my love and regrets and head back home. I started walking. 

I worked on my apology. Thumbed my way through one direction, deleted that. Tried again. 

I'm sorry love the bus ghosted and my ankles are cold! I'm gonna go home and stay there. 

My friend, we had a whole day planned but I'd rather not wait another twenty minutes for it to start.

I've been so looking forward to seeing you but the wind has made me terrible so I must scuttle back into my pile, which I'll leave once everything is perfect.  

The more I tried to get it right, the more full of shit I felt. I didn’t want to go home, I wanted to see Emmy. I also wanted to not be cold. A bus was not close, but there’s always one coming. I turned back toward my stop and kept on walking until the next bus caught up with me maybe a mile later. I took it to Emmy and everything happened. We ventured north to Uptown for tea and cake and wandering, caught up on our lives and loves, picked up fine paper goods and set them down, said hello to every dog we saw. The sun broke through the way it does. We watched a puppet show on the sidewalk. It was a nice day.

I’m glad I got on the bus. 

Six months later, I had plans with Tanuja for a poetry reading Uptown. Morning of, we were, both of us, low on battery. We gave each other an out, mutual grace and understanding—let’s play it by ear. No pressure or expectation. If it’s right, it’s right. There are other poets, other poems, other evenings. 

I took the out and told her I would be skipping poems. She said Girl, same and the day went on, the way days do. An hour or so before the reading began, I remembered about Emmy and my last time in Uptown, and what history has taught me tends to happen when I show up—days that I remember. A life I’d like to live.

I texted Tanuja. Said Fuck it, I'm going. 

She responded, laughing. 
Already on the bus.

It was stunning. The evening and everyone in it. Hanif Abdurraquib, Shira Erlichman and Paige Lewis and a packed house at Women and Children First, every seat filled, bodies leaning over bookshelves and into each other, everyone cute and kind and deferential, which can happen with poets and poetry. Not always, but sometimes. I left with many books, astonished. Tanuja and I stepped into a pub for a glass of wine and to reassemble. We stayed for hours. 

Always get on the bus.

“he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent // heaven”

Half a year after that, the world was different. No more readings. No in-person anythings. Little leaving the house. I didn’t take a bus for two years. We struggled mostly but tried to adapt. By August 2020, I felt so brittle, like the rest of us, for lack of hugging. I needed something to show up to.

I enrolled in Shira’s portable poetry workshop, In Surreal Life. I have taken it twice more since then. Between three month-long sessions, I’ve written upwards of one hundred poems. Most of them bad practice. Some of them, something. All of them, good to get out. More importantly, the people, these beautiful people I’ve met, these darling poets and the evenings we have. Nearly once a month someone steps up to host a write night or a very chill workshop or open mic kind of thing. We log into zoom and we read and we listen. We pay attention and share. It’s all very sweet and human and poems. I’ll get on the bus for that.

Last week I went back to Uptown. This time for Charif’s book release. The world keeps changing, so does the climate. It was a warm evening in April and I watched my friend hold a whole room together. He was a wave and we were in it. Charif is a poet of astounding intellect with a willing and generous heart and his book is unlike any other I’ve read. It’s precise and unsparing and particular to his singular experience on earth, and yet, I’ve never felt so held by such a meticulous sequence of poems. Also, they’re gorgeous. I hope you read them.

Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan on Bookshop.org

We have six more weeks in the midwest. Six more weeks to shed almost everything we own, including our home, which has been a beautiful home and one I have loved taking care of. Last spring in Chicago. I wrote a list, can you believe it, of what I would like to show up for. Here’s what I’m going to do: 

Decide what I love and love it deeply, again and again. 
Follow what makes me feel lighter. 
Get rid of all(?) my plants. And nearly everything else.
Make rest a priority.
Watch a little baseball. 
Pack as little as possible. 
Eat one (1) pot pie. 
Get on the bus for friendship.
Show up for poems how I can.
Leave what’s been home for almost twenty years, with all of this love in my heart. 

Okay. Here is your poem now.

---

My People

Charif Shanahan

I have longed to say My people
Not because I was born

Of two peoples, of blue
Tiled walls and strip malls.

Not because I don’t know
Where I belong, or

With whom, or worse
“Who I am”

As onlookers have
In their pity proclaimed,

The lovers, too,
After they’ve exited

My body which they felt
Emboldened to name. I

Have wanted to say My people
And to be clear

To all people, to any you
Imagined by the mind

Of an embodied you
That was also first imagined.

I am interested in repair
Without shame. I am

Interested in restitution
With anger. I am

Interested in anger
As love, in having

Anyone who hears the phrase
See it vanish into the edge

Of what they know, to know
How far I mean it to reach—

My people
As redundancy, as symbol

Of the first truth,
Immutable, almost

Banal in its assertion:

If you are on this earth,
You are of this earth.