I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies
if you believe me to be your enemy know this I accept
I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies
after June Jordan
I am the least inimical thing on the wide promenades of Nagoya
kissing my lover in rush hour even the dead do not give a damn
imagine no one thinking our bodies were damaged dangerous
delirious I hold his hand never thinking I would
morning washed down the face of the buildings
like a blind man shaving rusty puddles and sunshine
in front of the starbucks and I am become the action of my fate
content with the minute rebellion of living comrade
if you believe me to be your enemy know this I accept
terrible revenge in merciless clots of love
blossoming by daylight fragrant by night if the knot
of our bodies is a burden know this you are burdened alone
in the wilds of our joy hunted by a kiss an animal frothed
I have not threatened your soft moments and yet you are threatened
Ryan Dzelzkalns has poems appearing with Assaracus, DIAGRAM, The Offing, The Shanghai Literary Review, Tin House, and others. He received an MFA from New York University and a BA from Macalester College, where he was awarded the Wendy Parrish Poetry Prize. He has worked for the Academy of American Poets and was recently a Fulbright scholar in Tokyo, where he still lives. Read more at RyanDz.com.
More in this series
“the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” —Humphrey Bogart, ‘Casablanca’
My heaven is / the cosmos is what all that space was built for.
in & out of jean shorts (the reel catches)
I wish for sex out / in the open, to have / some strange body / glide over mine, to collide / as if to butterfly / underwater required not one / but two sets of salty / chests & jutting / calves
Choose Your Quarantine House (I – IV)
under the dark sitting pretty / on the patch of hardwood floor / where confession / and callousness meet
