Another Elegy
by Gentris L. Jointe
Malik, bright orange, with the wolfish jaw
understood the savagery
of staying alive—until he didn’t.
So what if he could sing
under torture?
It’s all gone now but the image of
a broad back, departing. Not tall,
but with a gait that suggested
an inward height. & what for?
A few bags, maybe. When they shot him
in his ferocious heart, the school
announced it on the intercom.
New jargon: Time to heal.
Grief management. My first
thoughts weren’t with his daughter
in whose mind he goes on dying.
I thought of his unfinished rap album,
how his booming voice would be
buried in a bruise of earth,
& wondered who would go on singing—
Rimbaud?
understood the savagery
of staying alive—until he didn’t.
So what if he could sing
under torture?
It’s all gone now but the image of
a broad back, departing. Not tall,
but with a gait that suggested
an inward height. & what for?
A few bags, maybe. When they shot him
in his ferocious heart, the school
announced it on the intercom.
New jargon: Time to heal.
Grief management. My first
thoughts weren’t with his daughter
in whose mind he goes on dying.
I thought of his unfinished rap album,
how his booming voice would be
buried in a bruise of earth,
& wondered who would go on singing—
Rimbaud?
Gentris L. Jointe is a recent graduate of the MFA – Poetry program at the University of Florida in Gainesville. His poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Blackbird, The Journal, Fourteen Hills, and The National Poetry Review, among others. He is originally from Philadelphia.
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Issue 18: Summer 2016
Issue 18: Summer 2016