The Drawbridge

Spelling & grammar want me to use bulkheads
instead of fuckheads & although I like bulk,

 

there’s nothing like the smack of a fuckhead.

 

Like Jack White, who says technology is a big destroyer
of emotion and truth,
                                        I dream of sledgehammering computers,
jumping on them, then throwing the detritus out the window—

 

feeling my own gunfire because who wants a watered-
down heart?

 

People call me dark, but a world without dark//
is just half a world.

 

I know you understand.
There’s a bridge between us, can you see it?

 

Didn’t you ever want to tear something down?
Smash it to make the parts talk their battered talk:

 

the stabbing edges & burning colors, the love compressed
in the steel beam & the raging yellow flame?

 

I’ve been dead a thousand years, & I’ve never tired
of the dying waving me away:

 

that last hand lifted between them & me:
that raised drawbridge of power,

 

that sweet breeze of that’s enough.


Jan Beatty’s sixth book is The Body Wars (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said, Jan Beatty’s new poems in The Body Wars shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters.” Beatty won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard, published in 2021. A new chapbook, Skydog, will be published by Lefty Blondie Press in March 2022.