2 Poems

Dustin Pearson

A Mind That Lets You Survive
Past the store fronts and the restrooms, past the crowd I break from for the guts
of the closed mall, I find a metal door lined in red letters one always pauses in front of
before opening, not knowing if an alarm will sound and obliterate the stillness wondering had brought.
With its opening is a man with sick eyes, a man excited at a life that’s new to him, one he walks toward
with a knife I know better than to wait for. The bar I pressed to open the door becomes a deadlock
I turn to keep the man out. The sigh I release realizing I’m inside my own mind, that I haven’t
yet developed one that wouldn’t let me survive.

Natatory
If I could write poetry like I swim, I’d never stop swimming, you said. Like so many things, you’d given up on this pursuit prematurely. Done with that year’s swimming and after a trip to the movies your wife didn’t like, it was mid-November when you admitted, I thought your friendship cooled down, which meant, you thought my desire to be around you fell, a lie you almost immediately revised, I know why exactly that is on my end, though. My changed priorities. What bonded us initially was poetry. I’m no longer invested in it, which meant I was only art to you, that your failure to grow your abilities from the margins became another thing you blamed me for. But didn’t we also talk about God and music, that woman’s voice you lodged in my head who sang, stop looking for answers in everyone’s face and when you’re looking for a friend, but it’s empty at the end, even listening to you explain the languages you spoke and the scenes your native Ukraine gave you before the new war erupted? You seemed to leave behind so many sacred things for Florida beaches and cheap airfare to New York and Phoenix. Had poetry been the whole of what you wanted, it would’ve been easy to peg you with a few thick books, books you’d never finish if you could build yourself up to open them. It seems sad I’ll never be as kind as I was that year I let you in, but aren’t we all learning how sometimes kindness leaves the world to lessen its flaws? I have to stop mourning potential and repressing anger, so I’m leaving you to the water. For what it’s worth, I did think it was a good line.

Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2022), A Family is a House (C&R Press, 2019), and Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018). In 2019, The Root named Dustin one of nine Black poets working in “academic, cultural and government institutions committed to elevating and preserving the poetry artform.” He is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo where he teaches creative writing and literature.