PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Jamaal May

PoetryMagazine.com

Jamaal May
USA

Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, MI where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His first collection of poems, Hum (Alice James Books, 2013), won the 2012 Beatrice Hawley Award. Winner of the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, his work also appears in journals such as POETRY, Ploughshares, the Believer, NER, and Kenyon Review. Jamaal has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He is founding editor of the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook and Video Series (www.organicweaponarts.com).

Chionophobia

Fear of Snow

Fluttering ash dissolves on your brother’s tongue.

He thinks of you building a fort from snow

before you knew what forts were

and he could stand in your footprints

without touching the sides.

Can two snowflakes be the same

on a ghost-white street where enough gather

to construct faceless snowmen? In this desert,

sand blinds the way snow did back home.

Your brother patches holes

in men with names he can’t or won’t learn,

and wonders if, somehow, you are still here,

using an earthmover to pour sand

into foxholes. Do you still hear soldiers claw

at the shifting weight of their fresh graves,

or are there only silent arms and legs

in your dreams, bent like strange flowers?

Is the sun a flash grenade? This heat

is so heavy the fruit stands buckle and ripple

like mirages, but your brother shivers

remembering your mother’s shiver,

the way she sank to the ground, heavy

with news, and your body comes home again.

Your bone-colored casket repeats

its descent, sinks under the flag, and a thud

resounds. Fades. He still hears it.

The rub of your snow pants, the fallout

of snowball fights, every ice-ball slapping

garage, snowflakes dragged in circles

by wind, until they blur like a sandstorm—

he hears it all. Deafening like footfalls

against the icy driveway, resonant

like your mother’s voice, calling

the wrong name—your name—again.

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