Tag: Iain Haley Pollock

by Iain Haley Pollock

The Irvine cops picked up Sherod

while he was riding Jimmy’s bike

to school. He’d snuck up into the scrub hills

above our complex to work on the fort

we were building with wood from a deserted

rancher’s shack. By the time he came down

to the bus stop, we were the diesel exhaust

that ferried us to our daydreaming hours.

Jimmy’s bike stood in the communal racks.

We all knew the combination to its lock

and took the Huffy as needed. Sherod’s need—

to be at Rancho Middle before his father

found out he’d never made it—his need

was one too many. Jimmy’s father,

out the door to work, saw his son’s bike

gone again, reported it stolen to the cops.

A morning patrol found the bike

underneath a black boy not in school

and hauling ass down Culver Drive.

I did not understand what adult machinations

led to my parents driving that afternoon, with me,

to the Irvine police station. My father

had emigrated from England in the 70s

and was hipped to the American scene as soon

as he started dating my mother. He got out

of our Chevette, looked back at his black wife,

his too-brown son, and said, Stay put, you two.

If he pulled that white savior bullshit now,

we’d have words. But I didn’t have that term

white savior then. Even if I’d known it,

I don’t think I would have used it that day.

Would have cared to use it. My friend was in jail

and headed to juvie, that scare story—whaled on

by high school monsters twice our size—tormenting

our nights and keeping our days straight and narrow.

I didn’t care what my father said inside the station,

with what English boys’ school curtness he said it,

with what iron-backed code of whiteness. Didn’t care

and was happy when he strode out with Sherod

trailing behind him. Sherod, who did not speak

on the ride back to our apartments, who watched rows

of eucalyptus blur by on University Avenue, who

the next morning we avoided at the bus stop,

who did not try to join us, who stood with his back

toward the bike racks, toward Jimmy’s bike, fastened

there again, with new lock, with double loop of new chain.

from Ghost, like a PlaceFind more by Iain Haley Pollock at the library

Copyright © 2018 Iain Haley Pollock
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Iain Haley Pollock

None of the men practicing

Tai Chai in a field by the river

are Chinese. An impulse tells me

to leave the path that dusts

my shoes with cinders and join them,

but once I tried these movements

and found harmony only

in their names: Hands like Clouds.

White Crane Spreads Wings. Search

for Needle on Sea Bottom.

Behind the men, a leaf drifts

along the current. I tell myself

it fell from a box elder—

I’ve hiked past stands of those trees

beside the creek that feeds this river.

And from these green waters,

the leaf will spill into a broader

brown river, and at the wide bay

where that would empty into the sea,

migrating red knots wing down

each May from Tierra del Fuego,

wing down withered, chests

sunken to breastbones, wing down

to crack open the husks

of horseshoe crabs and gorge,

bulk up to finish the flight

to the tundra, to nests scraped

into the frost-hard earth.

Throw the Loom. Flash Arms

like Fans. And fishermen bait

their lines with crab, and the colony

dwindles, and the shorebirds

die off. And the Black boys

of Philadelphia, this summer,

one gunned down each day.

from Ghost, like a PlaceFind more by Iain Haley Pollock at the library

Copyright © 2018 Iain Haley Pollock
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Iain Haley Pollock

in shadow she trailed shadow.

when i turned to face her,

she weaved between the mottled,

peeling trunks of sycamores

back the way we had come

then dissolved like last notes

of a radio’s static nocturne

into the high cattails

and banked morning fog.

i had enjoyed the night,

the pursuit, and was sorry

to see her go.

you and i met

the next summer,

your approach the pop

and flash of filament burning out,

a burst impressing the closed eye

with a promise of daybreak

even as it scatters the flurry

of moths, brings the narrow porch

to dark and cool.

today, a decade

of summers gone, while you shut off

lamps and drew down blinds, i stood

on our front step. looking back

into the shaded hall, i half expected

you weren’t there.

but out of the dimness,

your shape and strut.

you brushed past me,

led us down the street

where the sun radiated

from tracts of asphalt,

where pine boards nailed

across cavities in the brick

swelled and warped,

where in the oven air

picked-over meat on rib bones

turned seeping and sour.

you led

and did not disappear,

remained with me in this:

the too-bright world.

from Ghost, like a PlaceFind more by Iain Haley Pollock at the library

Copyright © 2018 Iain Haley Pollock
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Iain Haley Pollock

The boys are kicking over garbage cans

and smashing car windows with heaves

of glass bottles. Time in the pest house

of school or remediation on a road crew

has moved them to boredom with bare knuckles

and stolen knives. Soon, their insecurity

will concentrate on the grip of a Glock

till an enemy, who a minute before

was unknown and not an enemy, appears

under a streetlight. The provocation

will be slight: soft palms hardened

to a shove. In days to come,

friends of the enemy will strip bark

from the few trees they know and graffiti

their grief onto the trunks. And the boys,

even after the votive jars have filled

with rainwater and plastic rose bouquets

have somehow wilted in the humidity,

the boys will also mourn their killed.

In their woe they will want for a light

to slow-drag through them, a light

like the reflection of sequin or chrome.

They will not find it and they will not

find it until they are discovered faceup

in a dirt lot where neighbors remember

a house, a while back, was torn down,

where now bricks and teeth of glass

push up, like Indian bones, through the soil.

from Ghost, like a PlaceFind more by Iain Haley Pollock at the library

Copyright © 2018 Iain Haley Pollock
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Iain Haley Pollock

What flag will fly for me / When I die?

—Langston Hughes

From a distance, my flag

and star could be you. I could be.

If I weren’t, my body—the place

would still have need of it. No

Romanesque without me. I am.

I am. And the price of my being:

no monuments built me. None

save those cradled in crabgrass,

left for chicory. No monuments

but the air breathed. The history

of arches and burning

hearts. The history of false teeth

and matches. No monument

but the knowledge gained in overrun

gardens: yellow-ringed snakes

and plumage of undiscovered

birds. But the topography

of mountains we have yet

to scale (looming forever

in the haze).

My body, your body—

all our lives we have known

each other. Your arms clung

to porch columns. Mine painted

the fence in whitewash. Mine stood by

the gate and held it, every morning, open.

You saw me once. You do not see me.

My talk to you comes out a backward

cacophony, the chattering of crows

in the field’s distant sycamore.

You do not see me. You do not

see me. No monument

you’d ever recognize. A flutter.

A spring hinge. A flush

of violet above tough stalk.

A line of char in the soil.

A catch, in your lungs,

of cold air. I am. I could be.

from Ghost, like a PlaceFind more by Iain Haley Pollock at the library

Copyright © 2018 Iain Haley Pollock
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.