Two Poems: Jacob Sunderlin
AMENDMENT TO THE PLEDGE I SIGNED PROMISING TO NOT PROMOTE RADICAL THEORIES ABOUT THE OVERTHROW OF THE STATE WHILE TEACHING FOR THE STATE
Some election, some conviction, I have queued up Coltrane blowing into the empty seats of a theater in Japan, between them & out over the radio, playing this at them. They are getting shifty in the boat shoes & khakis of their fathers, insurance adjusters.
This boredom, I’ve done the math, 60 bucks an hour to sit through.
Just write down what you see I say, thinking of his breath— thinking of the 15 grand a year given to me to give them this.
* Later, at the laundromat, folding towels into trash bags, it’s still bouncing mouth-to-mouth—Russia’s paying them all this to rig the election, what they found—and the owner,
whose daughter trails smellgood spray behind her as she runs the machines— Whats that gotta do with him? They just afraid we’ll get a president’s got some balls? Everyone is holding their own. An old white woman cranks the handle on a washer full of whites & the bleach drifts from three machines over. It was less a recitation than a shouting— Ah, say can you see, how it’s an option to say not at all or maybe from where you are, which is high on an imaginary hill in that song, where the bomblight illuminates differently.
* The year he died, Coltrane told a reporter in Japan “I am trying to go to the best good that I can get to & as I am going there, becoming this & when I become if I ever become this (— becoming this—) will come out the horn.” That night “My Favorite Things” went an hour.
AMENDMENT TO THE PLEDGE I SIGNED PROMISING TO NOT PROMOTE RADICAL THEORIES ABOUT THE OVERTHROW OF THE STATE WHILE TEACHING FOR THE STATE
We read Frederick Douglass in the laundry room of a vaudeville hotel. My class, my room. They say this, I don’t. One wall is frosted glass bricks. During active shooter we squat against the drywall. Both walls are equally bullet resistant, police video security officer says. Barricading desks takes some practice. You have to practice. I am told to feel free to move them to the lounge. If the lounge is more or less bullet resistant, I can’t get a straight answer. The most important part of active shooter is, active shooter is not funny. All of us are masking, so nothing is funny. The dimmer switch hums in a frequency undetectable to me, but like being stabbed in the temple with an ice pick to adolescent ears, so the lights are needle-like. Blood-clotted cowskin—that line is always marked in school copies of the Frederick Douglass. They never fail to register the whip. I refer to school copies as ours, or even mine. The preface is letters from abolitionists. Let’s open our books to history as written by the lion. A camera fixed to the ceiling films all this. That the overseer is called artful, cruel, and obdurate goes unmarked in my copies. About what does the would-be abolitionist need further convincing? This question hangs in the air the camera films, fluorescence hums the needles I can’t hear. In the silence, a space not yet small enough to disappear inside. In active shooter, your bag, your bottle, your desk, your book can all be a weapon, the video police remind us, feel free.