Triptych in Which the Man Is Sometimes My Father

Abstract

Triptych in Which the Man Is Sometimes My Father Jonah Mixon-Webster (bio) In the first dream The man runs past dropping a black feather. He stops. Turns back on his heel, leaning to pick it up. Places it inside of my front pocket. My hands do not complicate the matter. In me is a hard edge clapped with rain. What it is, he says, is the thing he wouldn’t have. When I finally pull it out, I am a fallow child. In the next dream The man runs past dropping a black feather. He is a crook and makes me swallow it. He opens his jean to the light until I bend. Until he is well-bricked inside the mouth that makes me. He swings my jaw with the bell of his hips. My head lies back into the knock. What is there causes me to look up, and I catch a dent of air in my chest. This is how I learn to say water. In the other dream The feather is a headless bird and I am face down on a bathroom floor. Nothing is lit. The man’s face bears the shadow. He takes me by the meat of my collar. Turns my ear over to say a quiet thing. In another instance, he is the only one erect and the cutting opens a door in my gut. Aping what’s already in two. [End Page 304] Jonah Mixon-Webster JONAH MIXON-WEBSTER, a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow, is a poet and teaching artist from Flint, MI. He is a PhD candidate in English Studies at Illinois State University, where he is currently writing the dissertation “Stereo(TYPE): A Paracolonial Approach to Racial Performativity in African American Poetry and Critical/Creative Race Pedagogy.” His poetry and hybrid writing are featured or forthcoming in Muzzle Magazine, Kinfolks, Spoon River Poetry Review, Voluble: Los Angeles Review of Books, and the anthology Zombie Variations. Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press