It’s Always Forward
Poets can see into and beyond the surfaces of things: a slumber party, the fraught present, a forest. South Carolina’s Ray McManus shows how it’s done.
AMERICAN SLUMBER PARTY
It’s someone’s birthday and the sugar rush is fading.
I don’t know most of the people in this room.
Friends of a cousin. Older guys cooler than me.
In the other room, adults are laughing to a TV too loud.
My parents are in there somewhere, maybe not. An aunt,
an uncle. Then footsteps, then nothing.
We’re going to sleep upstairs and leave the window open.
There’s shouting from a house over. Cheers spike
and then the world goes dark again. It’s just a game.
Thousands of miles away, sleeping in a crowded room
there are kids being blown to pieces in their beds.
My cousin is whispering to his friend about a girl they know.
We have our blanket forts secure. I’ve fortified what I can.
My pillow is cocked and loaded. I will sleep good tonight.
THE FIRES WE SING
We tell the kids we can’t eat
a world without constellations.
We tell the kids we can’t eat pets,
or tales we’re told by old men.
or taleThey’re just animals.
or taleJust stories. Just men.
Because, whatever
the opposite of indifference is,
whatever the opposite of intolerance is,
whatever the opposite of extinction is,
it is forward. It’s always forward.
It can only be forward.
or taleThis is how our universe was born.
or taleThis is how our universe will be born again,
first spark, then bang,
and later, if the kids read the stars
and answer all the questions,
and learn how lines begin,
we can go for ice cream.
And when they leave,
because they can,
there will be nights when they’ll lie
awake to read signs the stars give.
And every night they can’t see above them,
will be more lonesome
than the night before,
and they’ll break in the dark
and they’ll break in the light,
and they’ll call it love,
and they’ll call it instinct,
but none of it will matter
if they can’t feel it.
And when the kids come back
or tale(because they always come back)
they will want us to say that
they are our constellations,
ripe and rotten,
drawn without boundaries
for no reason, no partial fact,
by no accident either,
and we’ll hold back
what we think they shouldn’t hear –
or talethe way the sky hides
or talethe secrets of parents,
or talethe way fathers hold their children
or talein their throats when no one is looking,
or talethe way towns become cities at night,
or talethe way mountains are built in the rain,
or talethe way two hands lock together
or taleunderwater and fuse, the way
or talethe sheet falls across the leg,
or talethe way we reach into darkness
or talefor the world around us,
or talesilent to voices that aren’t as strong.
And how easy it can be to forget,
even in our finest moments,
how much the kids will miss in this life
when we’re all covering our mouths,
how we think we know stars
when we see them,
how we stand facing the darkness
with our backs to the life-music
that only a fire can crank against a cold night,
how we breathe from it.
WE WERE ALWAYS IN A RUSH
This much I know:
I can walk across
the Lake Murray Dam with this girl,
and not speak
the language of trees.
She places her hand
on trunks and tells me their stories.
This one is a witness.
This one is a marker.
I tell her that I know
the age of a tree
by counting its rings
across the stump.
She tells me why they planted cedars,
how I can line the plots
if I know how to find them.
This one, she says,
has blood in its roots.
About the author
Ray McManus is the author of five collections of poetry: The Last Saturday in America (Hub City Press, 2024), the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award-winning Punch (Hub City, 2014), Red Dirt Jesus (Marick Press, 2011), Left Behind (Stepping Stones Press, 2008), and Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born(USC Press, 2007). His poems and prose have appeared in many journals and anthologies.
- Ray McManushttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/rmcmanus/
- Ray McManushttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/rmcmanus/
