Poetry Month Continues
This week, QView features the poetry of the English Department’s Kimiko Hahn and Ryan Black.
A Daughter
After Being Asked if I Write the Occasional Poem
After leaving Raxruhá, after
crossing Mexico with a coyote,
after reaching at midnight
that barren New Mexico border,
a man and his daughter
looked to Antelope Wells
for asylum and were arrested. After
forms read in Spanish
to the Mayan-speaking father,
after a cookie but no water, after
the wait for the lone bus
to return for their turn, after boarding,
after the little girl's temperature spiked,
she suffered two heart attacks,
vomited, and stopped breathing. After
medics revived the seven-year-old
at Lordsburg station, after
she was flown to El Paso where she died,
the coroner examined
the failed liver and swollen brain. Then,
Jakelin's chest and head were stitched up
and she returned to Guatemala
in a short white coffin
to her mother, grandparents,
and dozens of women preparing
tamales and beans to feed the grieving.
In Q'eqchi', w-e means mouth.
—Kimiko Hahn
Hatchlings
Though tough to experiment
on a crocodile in the wild,
laboratory research has yielded
that prior to hatching,
a little one begins to coo.
Why?
To signal to the mama,
start digging?
To cue siblings to coo
for a synchronous emergence?
Or to practice wheedling
for pastime or coddle? Or
perhaps to rehearse menace
that even a crocodile must acquire.
Maybe, though, cooing is fun. How
to research what transpires
in the head of a hatchling
before it's hatched—
and why we need to know—
might well be an intimacy
not meant to be trespassed.
—Kimiko Hahn
Why Bother?
Because even in the deep neighborhoods of Queens, Jonathan Franzen can find a houndshark, the smooth dogfish splayed beneath the bench
of an N train, rotting out, promising an empty car on a Wednesday night
in August, the worst heat of the summer, though some will mind an awful smell to pose the dead with props—a cigarette, a MetroCard, an open can
of Red Bull—the images posted to Instagram before a transit officer
can carry the shark out in a garbage bag. But, Jonathan, this isn’t figurative.
The dead dogfish is not a metaphor for the end of the social novel. And on streets where Hindi, Russian, Korean, and Colombian Spanish, by which
you must mean Jackson Heights, are spoken in equal measure, though
you’ll cut Colombian in revision, even here where in 1991 ugly news
could still reach you, no one speaks the dark and vegetating language
of shark. Why bother? Because the first word my niece spoke with proficiency was goodbye. Goodbye, park. Bye-bye, trees. Goodbye, Uncle Ryan.
There, there now. Goodbye. I’d read on trains that stitched the borough like a syntax
how an elegist submits to the ineffectual, that language is an equation of the dissimilar, undone as easily as Penelope’s loom. Gone, we say,
and ask something of permanence, an exchange, but the elegist,
inheriting a chorus, sings in half-forgotten grief, and the dead are made to rise
from the churchyard of poems to a votive of April stars. Goodbye, Mommy.
Goodbye, Da-da. Think of my sister, collapsed at the foot of her bed, an artery
hemorrhaging in the frontal lobe of her brain. Think of the EMT who radioed
overdose to Queens East, cardiac dysrhythmia, then held my sister’s head
to the side to draw out vomit with a gloved hand. At the hospital, it took
three men to sedate her, her body decoding each signal as threat, and when
her husband called there was no news—no planned surgery, no tomograph—
so he repeated her name for its simple truth, like an apostrophe, or like a child
learning their way into the new world. Six years from holding his only daughter.
And if grief’s a republic of worthless currency, make it prose, just once. Give it
consequence. Or let him be lonely.
—Ryan Black
