How to Braid an Artery
By Maya Salameh
A man, on TV, throws himself on a football. He breaks his collar from his bone. He tears the strings of his ham. He will never walk again. But he walks again, on TV a hero! ... His head is so dangerous, so American, so empty of everything except nothing. He is like a car, football makes his body into a beautiful shape for football to break it and make new bodies. All killer stink.
—Jim Quinn, “Men in Love”
: I laugh with the velocity of pigskin, discussing god with boys I will never see again. we toss languages around the table like we remember them, hull asunflower skeleton with our eyes:
:: an event
is just a set of things. a Sunday ago I:
: the street spills over our tired necks, & my brother fumbles the relic, scratching his script into tree stomach. my body: preceded me by three centuries at least. the city sculpts a screenplay out of us, sidewalk promising summers we might not survive to drink. Aleppo’s back hums when she sits down:
: I remember the city like a demarcation, or a divot in coffee.
: it was never about hagiography. it was about my tombstone & writing something different on it.
:: tell me how Aleppo taught me yardage, her treasured aches, listened to me stretch, eat. I braid the sameness with which we bleed, arrange the tolls on my wall like linebackers: tell me how I gurgle these letters, the dead’s grammar, the dead:
: a year ago I kept canisters of similes in my basement. I
watch boys become men
every night. I eat the music that makes me old again: my brother:
: recites the pavement with me, too busy to notice the varicose veins in
the asphalt:
:: an event
is just a set of things. a Sunday ago I:
: the street spills over our tired necks, & my brother fumbles the relic, scratching his script into tree stomach. my body: preceded me by three centuries at least. the city sculpts a screenplay out of us, sidewalk promising summers we might not survive to drink. Aleppo’s back hums when she sits down:
: I remember the city like a demarcation, or a divot in coffee.
: it was never about hagiography. it was about my tombstone & writing something different on it.
:: tell me how Aleppo taught me yardage, her treasured aches, listened to me stretch, eat. I braid the sameness with which we bleed, arrange the tolls on my wall like linebackers: tell me how I gurgle these letters, the dead’s grammar, the dead:
: a year ago I kept canisters of similes in my basement. I
watch boys become men
every night. I eat the music that makes me old again: my brother:
: recites the pavement with me, too busy to notice the varicose veins in
the asphalt:
Source: Poetry (October 2021)