Two Poems
by Gary Jackson
encore
You’re such a delicate boy / in the hysterical realm
—Garbage
After the standing ovation and feet stomping,
the lights come on and we begin to file out,
but I linger, and sure enough the band walks
back onstage to a roar of applause and Shirley
Manson jokes how she had to take a piss.
It’s when she offers us a choice, my heart
begins to break. She lists B-sides: Subhuman,
Kick My Ass, Trip My Wire, but no one
cheers loud enough to choose, so she
keeps going and if you give me a minute
I could still sing each one, trace them
back to 1998 when a woman I met online
found bootleg records and burned them
to CD to mail to me. You’re thinking
this was a token of affection or the start
of something illicit, but she just knew
how much I loved the band, and so did
she, and whatever feeling she had for me
was just a reflection of my good friend who
I think she truly loved, at least long enough
to finally leave her abusive husband, but by
then my friend was dead. So, she wrote me
a letter instead, thanking him and asking
if I could pass it along, reminding me
how far a little bit of love can go.
When Shirley says Cherry Lips,
everyone screams, so the band
launches in. I would have preferred
one of those B-sides,
but I still sing along,
recall this same encore from 26 years
ago, the last time I saw them live in the
Uptown Theater in Kansas City with my
good friend: a lifetime ago, but not mine.
opening nights
Hmmmph, the man says, pushing past the boy
holding his small bucket of popcorn, watching
the King of a fictional nation pummel the villain
with an efficacy that belies CGI. My friend studies
the man leaving the dark theater in a hurry, before
turning to me and half-joking, I feel like I shouldn’t
be here. Is something bad going to happen to us?
I tell him he’ll be a’ight, though, really, I have no
fucking idea if that’s true anymore, or if it ever
was. But I’ve never felt safer than in the midnight
showing years ago I snuck out alone to see, and sat
between two large men. When the music started
and the text crawl began, the world fell away and we
sat upright, excited like children still up after dark.
Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collections small lives, origin story, and Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He co-edited The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, and his poems have appeared in journals including Callaloo, The Sun, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. He is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair of English in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. And his favorite pizza toppings are sausage or mushroom; or maybe garlic, pepperoni, and olives? Also, a good Margherita is hard to beat…
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