For Joseph, Who Drowned in the Creek
BY JASON BAYANI
It’s always the boys (we boys)
who mistake our heartbeats for blunt instruments––
our arms bent sinew and strong enough to move mettle
like I got the steel for this
like I am not movement and men, real men are foundations.
Why do we boys tempt the water when it wakes?
We boys, who know the armistice in its steady hum
how we engage quiet with a fickle fuse
how we tuck it tight into the chamber of our palms.
Who would pray for rain on a day like this?
For the creek to build into a mean froth.
The white of its rushing, like a static pulse
like bent teeth. The long descent into the ravine,
pushing through the brush, your dirty sneakers
rattling the creek at its streaming margins.
This much motion, it can make a lie of us.
These lives we made building ourselves into brick.
It’s always the boys (we boys)
who mistake our heartbeats for blunt instruments––
our arms bent sinew and strong enough to move mettle
like I got the steel for this
like I am not movement and men, real men are foundations.
Why do we boys tempt the water when it wakes?
We boys, who know the armistice in its steady hum
how we engage quiet with a fickle fuse
how we tuck it tight into the chamber of our palms.
Who would pray for rain on a day like this?
For the creek to build into a mean froth.
The white of its rushing, like a static pulse
like bent teeth. The long descent into the ravine,
pushing through the brush, your dirty sneakers
rattling the creek at its streaming margins.
This much motion, it can make a lie of us.
These lives we made building ourselves into brick.
JASON BAYANI is a recent graduate of Saint Mary’s MFA program. He is a Kundiman fellow and a highly regarded veteran of the National Poetry Slam scene. Jason has worked with homeless youth for most of his adult life and is now working and seeking work as a college professor. His work has been published in Maganda Magazine, the 2005 National Poetry Slam anthology, Seventeen Hills, and Write Bloody’s classroom anthology, Learn Then Burn. He has been on 7 National Poetry Slam teams and is the 2010 IWPS representative for Oakland. He is also Literary Death Match’s 100th episode winner. He performs regularly around the Bay Area and sometimes outside of it.