God Uses a Ball-Peen Hammer

Abstract

God Uses a Ball-Peen Hammer Janice N. Harrington (bio) Primitive, meaning crude or original. But thenwho isn’t self-taught? The geometry of two bodiesatop a plane of Percale sheets. I can’t explainhow people treat one another, or how I’ve treated anyone.The cop on the newscast says Bring it. You fucking animals.Bring it. Primitive behavior. A child raises her handsin the air, not to God, not to be lifted, but to say Don’tshoot. Don’t shoot. Tonight, the oak, the magnolia,the ash tree lift black limbs. From a distance, their limbslook like flames. Burn, Motherfucker. Burn.Everything surrenders. I have only a crude understandingof any of this. How rough the world. Consider the codebeneath this electric dizziness. Rainforest deforestation:An indigenous family lost beside a road in Brazil. Naked.Mud-painted. Infested with intestinal parasites. Deathbecause of what you don’t know. A life made from whatyou do. On a primitive trail the grass touches your feet.You can run an entire life on an alternating current.The great motherboard above us: explosion, scatter, drift,chance. The spore of algae on the antenna of a satellite.In space surrounded by void, between the shiny polka dotted stars,black bodies lift in surrender, reach outward. Chaosis when there’s nothing left to hold on to. History is primitive,rough, crude, savage, primal: not a precision tool: a mallet. [End Page 1] Janice N. Harrington JANICE N. HARRINGTON, an associate editor of Callaloo, is author of The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (2011), Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a number of books for children. She teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press