We said Octavia Butler wrote
sci-fi, it was the correct
answer on the test but we knew
it was a lie. Many of us, we kindred,
by then, had held twin-toned
hands and crossed up ankles across
centuries. Had played a game
called “Worldlessness,” in Southern cities
like Chicago where, under a bridge
for a freeway designed to separate
the continents, one stood and listened
to a river overhead wider than
the ocean. Just like that like crushed metal
in the sound of slant rain
and we were the sound of the impossible
crossing that happens like midnight
in your mind. This morning,
23 July 2015, a front page story in the
New York Times details the
carbon date of goatskin leaves
upon which may be the oldest
extant portion of the Quran. Several
experts attest to the plausible
range of dates: 568 to 684. Other
experts agree with caveat:
the range specifies the age
of the parchment not the ochre
print on the page. Also on
page one begins coverage of Sandra Bland’s
arrest and subsequent death
in her cell in Texas. In my morning print
edition, the one which can’t be
un-published after the fact, after the jump,
to page A14, about her arrest
near the Prairie View A&M campus,
the article reports the incident
“occurred only a few hundred years
from the university’s main
entrance.” I checked online but
now it says “a few hundred yards from”
the entrance. On the test we’ll say
the error was corrected. At the same time,
when we kindred, that’s to say the living,
turn the page, and certainly when
driving, say, from Chicago to Texas, or hell,
from Texas to Chicago, and most
absolutely when told we’re out of our lane,
we’ll be careful, as ever, to verify the century we’re in.
from Let it Be BrokeFind more by Ed Pavlic at the library
Copyright © 2020 Ed Pavlic
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.