STEPHEN GIBSON Noir

STEPHEN GIBSON

Noir

Hair clumped on duct tape, skull in a trash bag, some cute logo on a child’s dirty pink T-shirt which I can’t remember, but seeing it as I ate pizza and drank beer in Rome at an outside table under an awning of some fast-food joint across from the Colosseum, one more tourist

just trying to get away from all the other tourists— I couldn’t look away from the TV. The trash bag had been ripped open—bite marks on finger joints, the skull, and what was left of the dirty pink T-shirt. Some kind of animal. You can’t leave a body outside and not expect that to happen. All around, people ate

and watched the same news program as I did, as I ate pizza and drank beer, surrounded in Rome by tourists just like myself who went looking for a table outside and ended up staring at a child’s remains in a trash bag. This was before the Florida case with that child’s T-shirt which also had some cute saying on it, some beach-joint

kid’s T-shirt with sparkles and place names every joint sells from Clearwater to Fort Lauderdale. As people ate, I heard “monster” in Italian. The saying on the T-shirt was in Italian. So was the broadcast—and I was a tourist looking in, you might say, on dirty laundry. A trash bag isn’t “dirty laundry” with a child’s remains left outside—

nonetheless, I was looking in as others looked outside themselves and didn’t like what they saw. That food joint in Rome was like a thousand others; a thousand trash bags were being stared at as I sat at that table, drank beer, ate pizza while across the street from me, hundreds of tourists were lined up to get into the Colosseum, wearing T-shirts

and shorts and sandals and skirts and flip-flops, T-shirts with the faces of bands on them always worn outside and never tucked in, T-shirts with foreign logos tourists just love, who wear straw hats as they eat gelato in joints like the one I was sitting in where I drank beer and ate pizza—and heard “monster” as people stared at a trash bag.

I looked at the T-shirts all around in that fast-food joint waiting to order, waiting for outside tables, as I ate pizza and drank beer, a tourist, with remains filling a trash bag.

FINALIST, 2017 LAUX/MILLAR POETRY PRIZE

MARIO ARIZA

Erratic transcription of notes taken at a refugee camp in Anse-A-Pitre, Haiti.

The refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come. —Giorgio Agamben, We Refugees

Laurencia Etienne has a tumor: “Gigantic Uterine Miamazilosis.”

Ezekiel finds nothing in the toasted choking dust but hunger.

The priest dispenses Marna-Pack Famine Relief Rice, iron fortified.

For six months: No papers, no money. No rain since baldest days of cloudless June.

Domingo beaten by the police for no reason but that he looked Haitian.

Because the radio whispered to Geniseé Chat that it was gonna be like ’36 again, because she heard the tígueres from the pueblo talking, because someone asked her to say parsley.

The climate of fear, not the drought, brought him here, since this parched earth already belongs to Antonio Jean-Luis.

Niné came on the old paths, by the old roads, that only she remembers.

The owners of land from here to Barahona had Jeremy Pierre water their fields with his sweat, now on this side of the earth the owners of the land let him squat, give him little jobs.

There are 4,000 in this camp.

All of the crop is lost, but there was a sweet rain once years back and then the land was good, yes, Annette Jeudi’s family all had their fill, yes, there was plenty to glean in the fields after harvest.

Chicho the cane cutter with work-gnarled thumb, Bertrán the stevedore with truck-broken back.

Aquino who harvested yuca, plantain, manioc, pigeon pea, red kidney beans, rice.