‘Garden of the Gods’
— Joyce Chong
These days, real life
feels like science fiction and science fiction
can be truer than life—or at least
true to life
This week, a snapshot on intimacies; the division between public and personal spaces, the secret intimacies of others we are privy to. Published in the latest talent-filled issue of The Adroit Journal, Ama Codjoe pulls us briefly, entirely into another moment, another place and mind. There’s something completely natural about the way this poem takes on the passive flow of thought, grounding first the reader in the mind of the speaker, the speaker in the familiarity of their companion, and drawing lines between the work of Octavia Butler and the play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.
I want to feel
what my lips taste like and how his it feels
good really feels.
The lens pulls out, almost expansively, from quiet personal intimacies to those that are larger and tied within entire systems and structures that exist outside of ourselves. As natural as the movement and progression of the poem is, it is also a reminder of how deeply we are grounded in our identity. How inextricably race and the social constructs and myths surrounding it can reach us, cling just as close as the things we keep near to ourselves, fictions sticky to skin.
And—there’d be a plot twist in the first
few pages: with his dying breath
the last black man in the whole entire world
would, like a god, animate a new one.