I emailed my husband a poem, and he replied by sending me a to-do list.
I am a long drive through ugly country.
Sometimes, we need to give people more than they deserve.
Today, the sun rises over endless fields of what.
I’m having a strange day in which everything my left hand touches feels rough and everything my right hand touches feels smooth.
Sometimes I feel like a faint pencil line under all the wrong words.
I want so much for this day.
I sing sweet songs while I piddle around the house, just like my mother did. My husband studies the qualities of maple leaves scattered on a table, just like his father would.
Driven to abstraction.
I just saw a flock of birds flying in the shape of a giant bird.
The first wound was in the right hand …………………..and occurred at the patrol car as confirmed by skin tissue found on the car. …………………………………..It was the only close wound.
The Body
The body weight is 289 pounds and the body length is 77 inches. The state of preservation is good in this unembalmed body. Rigor mortis is well developed.
The body is heavier than ideal weight base upon height //. Lividity is difficult to access due to natural skin pigmentation. There is no peripheral edema present.
Personal hygiene is good.
No unusual odor is detected as the body is examined. There is no abnormal skin pigmentation present. There is no external lymphadenopathy present //
The pupil of the left eye is round, regular, equal and dilated. The scleral and conjunctival surfaces of the left eye are unremarkable. The right eye cannot be accessed due to an acute traumatic injury (gunshot wound).
Gunshot Wounds
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the vertex of the scalp. There is a gunshot entrance wound of the central forehead. There is a gunshot exit wound of the right jaw.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the upper right chest. There is a gunshot entrance wound of the lateral right chest. There is a gunshot entrance wound of the upper ventral right arm.
There is a gunshot exit wound of the upper dorsal right arm.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the dorsal right forearm. There is a gunshot exit wound of the medial ventral right forearm. There is a tangential // gunshot wound of the right bicep.
There is a tangential // gunshot wound near the ventral surface of the right thumb. There is a gunshot related defect present near the right eyebrow //. There is a gunshot related defect present near the right eyelid //.
The Heart
The surface of the heart is smooth, ………………………….glistening and transparent.
Tissue Fragment
Sections of the tissue fragment from the “exterior surface of the police officer’s
motor vehicle” are consistent with a fragment of skin overlying soft // tissue.
There are features of desiccation/drying artifact present within the soft tissue.
There is a granular layer present within the upper layer of stratified
are present within the basal layer of the stratified squamous epithelium.
The Hair
The hair is black. This represents the apparent natural color. The hair is worn short to medium length. There is a goatee present on the face. The body hair is of normal male distribution.
He Came Around
he came around …………………..he came around ………………………………………with his arm extended …………………………..fist made ……..and went like that ………………………….straight at my face with his … ………………………………………….a full swing with his left hand
Mace
I know how mace affects me so if I used that in that close proximity I was gonna be disabled per se. And I didn’t know if it was even gonna work on him if I would be able to get a clear shot or anything else.
Um, then like I was thinking like picturing my belt going around it. I don’t carry a taser so that option was gone and even if I had one with a cartridge on there, it probably wouldn’t have hit him anywhere.
He Said
He said, “You’re too much of a fuckin’ pussy ………………………..to shoot me” and grabbed my gun.
Then
Then I took my left arm and I pinned it against my back seat and pushed the gun forward like this …………………..took my left hand, placed it against his and my hand on the side of my firearm and pushed forward both of my arms.
Somewhat Lined Up
When it got there I saw that it was somewhat lined up with his silhouette and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. Pulled it again, nothing happened.
Um I believe his fingers were over in between from the hammer and the slide preventing it from firing.
Blood
The first thing I remember seeing is glass flyin’ and blood all over my right hand on the back side of my hand.
……………..Um, he looked like he was shocked initially but, and he paused for a second and then he came back into my vehicle and attempted to hit me multiple times
………………………….He had, after I had shot and the glass came up, he took like a half step back and then realized he was okay still I’m assuming. He came back towards my vehicle and ducked in again his whole bod …
………………………….whole top half of his body came in and tried to hit me again.
……………………………………..Um …
Again
I tried to fire again, just a click. Nothing happened.
…………………….After the click, I racked it and as I racked it, it just came up and shot again.
Dust
I was still in this position blocking myself and just shooting to where he was ’cause he was still there.
……………………Um, when I turned and looked, I realized I had missed I saw, a, like dust in the background and he was running …
A Grunting Noise
When he stopped, he turned, looked at me, made like a grunting noise and had the most intense aggressive face I’ve ever seen on a person.
Still Charging
Still charging hands still in his waistband, …………………..hadn’t slowed down. I fired another set of shots.
…………Same thing, still running at me hadn’t slowed down, hands still in his waistband.
He Went Down
He went down his hand was still ………………………….under his, his right hand was still ……………under his body looked like it was still ……………………………….in his waistband. I never touched him.
Swabs
Swabs from Michael Brown’s t-shirt / Swabs from Michael Brown’s shorts / Swabs from the palm of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swabs from the back of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swabs from the palm of Michael Brown’s right hand / Swabs from the back of Michael Brown’s right hand / Swab from the fingernail scrapings/clippings of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swab from the fingernail scrapings/clippings of Michael Brown’s right hand / Piece of apparent tissue or hardened nasal mucus from the driver front exterior door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swab from the driver rear passenger exterior door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swab from roadway in front of 2943 Canfield / Swab from roadway in front of 2943 Canfield / Swabs from RBS on the upper left thigh of [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform pants / Swabs from top exterior left front door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from exterior left front door mirror of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from interior left front door handle of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s “SIG P229” / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform shirt—left side and collar / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform pants—left side / Buccal swab reference sample from [Police Officer] Wilson / Bloodstain card reference sample from Michael Brown
The Deceased Hands
The deceased hands were bagged with paper bags to save any trace evidence
—
The text above was taken directly from the documents pertaining to the grand jury investigation of Michael Brown’s shooting. Omitted words are indicated with a double slash (//). Omissions do not alter the context of the information provided. Read the grand jury documents here.
May everyone involved in this tragedy find healing. May we all find our way out of this, of this and so much more.
I am thankful that my entry and exit wounds are only emotional, not physical. I am thankful that I have no gunshot-related defects. I am thankful that I am not lying dead on an examination table while someone makes note of my BMI, my skin pigmentation, the color of my hair, the scleral and conjunctival surfaces of my left eye which—at the time of examination—is my only eye.
I am thankful that my flip flops were not found lying west of me in the roadway.
I am thankful that the examiner cannot open me up and look at my glistening, transparent heart. Thankful that I have not left tissue fragments on the exterior surface of a police officer’s motor vehicle, that there is no dessication or drying present within my soft tissue. Thankful that I have not been described as grunting, as aggressive, as having the most aggressive face ever seen on a person. That I have not been described as crazy. Just crazy.
I am thankful that the only weapon I am perceived to have is my voice. Thankful that my hands were not bagged to save any trace of evidence, that I did not lie in the road dead for more than four hours. That I have not been reduced to the swabs taken from my shirt, from my shorts, from my palms, from the backs of my hands, from my fingernails, from the roadway, from the thigh of the police officer’s pants, from the left side of his pants, from his collar, from the tissue I left on the police officer’s front door, from his back door, from his door mirror, and from the inside of his door handle.
I am thankful that I did not lose consciousness immediately from the head wound to my face, that I was not unprotected when I collapsed, that the boney prominences on the right side of my forehead and cheek were not abraded as the road stopped my fall. I am thankful that my flip flops were not found lying west of me in the roadway and that my red baseball cap was not found near the police officer’s vehicle.
I give thanks on this day. Thank you. Thank you. Amen.
I intended to write a piece on poetry yesterday, but instead I experienced a tear in my retina. Right eye. Noonish. I saw white lights like fireworks, followed by a hovering gray blob that obscured my vision. It was roughly the shape of an acorn cap or a winter hat with a fuzzy ball on top. An ophthalmologist at KU Medical Center saw me right away. He looked deep into my vitreous gel with a fancy headlamp that made him look like he was about to go spelunking and exclaimed, I see the acorn in your eye! I thought he was making a joke, but apparently he could see a bundle of proteins torn from my retinal lining floating in the gel.
Why does the poetic image communicate faster than other forms? A few years ago, I asked this very question on Facebook and then proceeded to answer it myself. How annoying of me. My answer was as follows:
Arthur Koestler has an interesting theory. He says poetry requires thinking on a third plane, a kind of “bisociation,” meaning perceiving a situation or an idea in two individually consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference. This bisociation disturbs our patterns of thinking/feeling and causes a crisis, which requires a third plane of thinking/feeling to arise, one that is antithetical to but that does not negate the strife of the two.
Since this moment of entry into the poem is a moment of crisis, I would argue that we respond to the crisis the way we are hard-wired to respond to all crises—as quickly as possible. Our entry into the poem is similar to pulling a hand away from a scalding object before realizing on a conscious level that the object is hot. It’s instinctual, a survival tactic. Perhaps bisociation in poetry works on this level as well—because of the crisis the poem presents, we move swiftly to a different mode of thinking/feeling that allows us to enter the poem without completely fracturing our identities, without obliterating our ways of seeing and moving through the world. Bisociation is a way of surviving the poem, of seeing the world as we experience it on a day-to-day level, then seeing the world of the poem itself, then seeing a plane on which to stand, one that straddles the two and gives the reader a place to exist, to breathe.
Perhaps this is why poems work on us so quickly, why the image communicates faster in poetry than in other forms of writing. Precisely because poems put us in crisis.
I removed that post from Facebook years ago, but I stashed it in my poetry files. I came across it today and appreciated it as one way to understand how poems work. I also appreciated my former self for leaving me this trace. It could prove useful when people ask me what poems are, how the mean, and under what conditions they operate.
If you look at a vertical sagittal section of the human eye, you are supposed to see something that resembles a camera. That’s not what I see. I see an angelfish without the fins. I’m sure this says something fundamental about me. The watery fish in the head. The brain home to an aquarium. The two specimens that cannot swim, that cannot escape, that do my bidding, that are forced to document the production.
In his poem “Trace,” Eric Pankey writes: To occupy space is to shape it. / Snow, slantwise, is not white / But a murk of winter-black basalt. / In the gullied, alluvial distances, / On the swallow-scored air, / Each erasure is a new trace.
Having a torn retina is not without its consequences. I feel like a mean girl punched me in the eye. Maybe at a bar. Maybe after I looked at her the wrong way. Maybe after she mistook the fireworks in my eyes for something I never intended.
If you look closely enough at a poem while wearing a headlamp, you can enter its recesses and observe the detail held within its vitreous gel. What drifts and where. What has lost viscosity with age and use. What holds fast. But when you occupy the poem, you change it. We change things by looking. There is no way around this.
When I told my husband about my retina, he asked if reading poetry might have caused the tear. I said poetry had no bearing on what happened. He seems to think poetry leads to disaster. I’ve tried to tell him for years now that we all lead ourselves to disaster, with or without poetry. Poems simply document the path from cradle to grave; from point of entry to point of no exit; from one dark, craggy landmark to another.
I grew up eating okra, which my mother breaded and fried. I never knew until I moved to Kansas City and bought a bag of frozen okra that it was hairy on the outside and slimy on the inside. I didn’t know the seeds were soft and moved within the mouth in an unsettling manner, avoiding the tongue and slipping down the throat. Okra and I parted ways after our tryst in the frozen food section of the Piggly Wiggly at 51st and Main, but I see it sometimes in gumbo and imagine what we might have become if we had stayed together all these years.
I feel like I’m in a car driving down a dark road, just two headlights between me and the black world.
I read a poem today that was so good I had to stop reading poems. It wasn’t about okra. It was about family. It was one of those poems that makes me cry and pace and ultimately climb the stairs to the main bedroom, at which point I consider the unmade bed and its implicit invitation to ride out the rest of my day there in the disturbing drift of silence and synthetic down.
Now I’m sitting at the computer wondering what comes after silence. I looked to the moon for an answer, but it seems to have vacated the sky. I don’t trust this level of darkness.
My husband will be home soon enough to invade my senses in the best or worst of ways. My tongue is already burning. My arms tingle. I don’t know if my body will accept or reject the presence of another human being in its vicinity.
There are not enough light bulbs to illuminate this room. I feel like I’m in a car driving down a night road, only two headlights between me and the black world. But I am not moving. I just keep staring at the same two monitors and, behind them, the same set of bookshelves—one shelf sports a thumb piano, the other a rusted monkey with articulated arms and legs.
Maybe I want poems to be pop-up books or choose-your-own-adventure verses. Maybe I want them to be origami. You would buy them flat, and the poem would be revealed as you folded the paper into the proper form.
I wonder if I could sauté okra in water and if I could learn to like it that way, if I could ever eat it without thinking of my mother. I wonder if my husband could lasso the sun and place it on my desk like a lamp. If not, maybe he could take me to the lighting section at IKEA. I could stand under all those fixtures and pretend to be Cinderella at the ball. Someday I will make my own light, like the stonefish or the false moray eel. I will be the bright thing in the shadows.
My CPU warms my feet. The heat makes me think something is curled up next to me, a small being in need of comfort.
Dana Henry Martin 