Made to Explode Poems SANDRA BEASLEY Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. For the grandmothers Contents HEIRLOOM ELEPHANT LONG JOHN SILVER’S THE CONVERSATION WINTZELL’S OYSTER HOUSE NOSTALGIA WE GOT AN A— MONTICELLO PEACHES TOPSY TURVY MY WHITENESSES BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE *** WEAK OCEAN THE SNIPER DANCE KISS ME JEFFERSON, MIDNIGHT LINCOLN, MIDNIGHT CHERRY TREE REBELLION ROOSEVELT, MIDNIGHT EINSTEIN, MIDNIGHT TITANIC, MIDNIGHT AMERICAN ROME *** PIGS IN SPACE BILOXI BACON RHYMES WITH STILL LIFE WITH SEX HAINS POINT WINTER GARDEN PHOTOGRAPH CARD TABLE IN PRAISE OF PINTOS THE VOW LITTLE LOVE POEM *** DEATH BY CHOCOLATE AN ACCOMMODATION INTERSECTIONALITY CUSTOMER SERVICE IS SAY THE WORD POP SELF-PORTRAIT WITH GEORGE CATLIN BASS PRO SHOPS NON-COMMISSIONED: A QUARTET LAZARUS EPIC Acknowledgments Made to Explode HEIRLOOM Lo, twelve children born to a woman named Thankful in Nampa, by the border between Oregon and Idaho, or as it will be remembered: Ore-Ida. Lo, two of her sons drive to Miami not knowing if their plan will work. Lo, what were once waste scraps fed to the cows now repackaged—the fry shavings sliced, spiced, and oiled. Lo, a chef at the Fountainebleau takes the bribe. Lo, Tater Tots are dished onto the tables of the 1954 National Potato Convention and soon, enshrined in the freezers of America. Three decades later, the golden age of my childhood is a foil-lined tray plattered with Ore-Ida product, maybe salt, maybe nothing but hot anticipation of my fingertips. Lo, my mother is a great cook and Lo, my grandmother is a terrible one, but on tinfoil plains they are equal. I need you to understand why my father will never enjoy an heirloom tomato glistening, layered in basil. Put away your Brandywines, your Cherokee Purples, your Green Zebras. Lo, as with spinach, as with olives, he tastes only the claustrophobia his mother unleashed from cans to feed four children on a budget. We talk little of this. Lo, what is cooked to mush. Lo, what is peppered to ash. Lo, the flavor rendered as morning chore—that this, too, is a form of love. ELEPHANT On the Route 7 strip, next to the office supply store, next to the pool supply store, next to the Tower Records, next to the T.J. Maxx, the Ranger Surplus lurked where I shopped only at the edges: iron-on patches, all-weather lighters, vintage plate pin-ups, never venturing into the groin of camouflage and camping gear, until I began buying weapons including a mace, a chained flail, several throwing stars, and the book Contemporary Surveillance Techniques, with its cover art showing a man crouched in a stereo speaker, all gifts for my father, because what do you get the man who has everything—and by everything I mean a large-caliber shell casing upright and decorative in the living room, where you might expect a potted ficus to be— and these, too, were the years he gave me T-shirt after T-shirt, souvenirs of every posting and deployment, including the one that said Hard Rock Cafe Baghdad— Closed—Kuwait, Now Reopening— T-shirts that fit poorly over my new breasts, boxy, unflattering, and so I shut them away in drawers again and again, each of us trying to say to the other I see you, the way a blindfolded man takes the tail into his hands, believing from this he can see the elephant. LONG JOHN SILVER’S Once again at the Long John Silver’s of 1988 the rope-slung walkway seems to sway under my feet as I look up at the Cape Cod with its steepled roof, trimmed in yellow, and lean my whole weight to the wrought-iron sword that serves as a door handle. At the counter, I order a fish fillet served in a folded paper Treasure Chest with a handful of fries to hide the Secret Compartment; hold the hush puppies, corn cob on the side. I carry the blue plastic tray with care to a booth paneled in the mahogany of an officer’s quarters, then sit on a bench vinyled like a nautical flag. The batter is always fluffy with club soda and here, no one has died yet. My teeth cut a smile into the Icelandic cod, and perhaps I will go back to order a chicken plank or a tray of crunchies swept from fryer’s belly, which they will give me for free. When I look back on all that I’ve done, I want to be the person stubborn enough to found a chain of Seafood Shoppes in Lexington, Kentucky, five hundred miles from any ocean, named for a character in a Scottish novel. I want to admit I’m doubled over and howling, yet reach up to ring the Captain’s Bell on my way out. THE CONVERSATION Fireflies, Col. Glenn calls them— banging the capsule’s wall to prove their movement. This will be the gesture Hollywood claims as history—how space dazzles even the seasoned airman, maddens like Titania’s touch. The movie version sees what he sees: Florida yawn, Delta yawp, a sunrise inside every hour, lightning over the Indian Ocean. Yet the operatic soundtrack, paced in gilded silence, is not what he hears. Wonder-ese is not the language he speaks. For this, we turn to the transcript. Pilot to Cap Com; Cap Com to Pilot. This is Friendship 7, going to manual. Ah, Roger, Friendship 7. Pilot, Texas Cap Com, Cape Canaveral. Cap Coms chiming in from Canary, Canton, Hawaii, Zanzibar, India, Woomera: every visual check on the gyros, inverter temp, every correction to pitch and yaw, fuel, oxygen, Ah, Roger, Ah, Over. Say again your instructions please. Over. Do you read? Stand by. You can be honest. This is Godspeed-less, workaday chatter. But in these pages my grandfather lives forever— a Navy captain charged with Glenn’s vitals, stretching his stethoscope across 162 miles and eighteen tracking stations. I hear him in each pressure check. I see him biting his lip, leaning toward a bank of dials while the retropackage breaks, burns. No one knows if the heat shield will hold. Captain Pruett goes unnamed. This is how history claims us: not in the gesture of one but in the conversation of many, the talk that gets the job done. We climb into the syrup-can capsule to circle the Earth three times. The miraculous swarm, we will realize, is condensation. The light blinks at us, flake and ice of our own breath. WINTZELL’S OYSTER HOUSE Before six seats and a trough of oysters, before J. Oliver slathers the wall in homespun, Charles W. Peters sells squash here, and canned beans; he sells bed frames & dressers & side tables; insurance against rising waters; he sells whatever will send nine daughters and sons through college. In 1891, a Black man can build two stories of clapboard for $2,000, can aspire to his own furniture company, can preside over the Mutual Aid
