I Am Not Good

A poem by Davi Gray.

I Am Not Good

It’s winter in Minneapolis again and all I want
is something to eat. I should cook, but I go
to the fridge and open the door and just
stand there. There’s something I’m trying not to
see, someone, something—I can’t decide
if the once-living still count as someone
or when, exactly, we become a thing.

Not the kind of thing we must seem to the wicked—
but I can’t—
I can’t do this right now. I have cried
in every room in this house. Once I went
outside and sat on the slippery—
the slick—
the frozen watery ground like the world
when I wasn’t looking had cried, too,
and this world—
no, those—
no—

A coldness creeps through the city and I can’t—

Some minutes or seconds or days ago I let go
the refrigerator door and it whispered shut
and the air was—you could suffocate in there
and it would feel a little bit like today. And
the day began with the end—it was a day like
any other and now it’s tomorrow or maybe
the next day, or the next, I can’t tell anymore.

I stood at the fridge and I read a poem
on my phone, and then another, and another,
it was Danez, Amanda, Cornelius, it was
Renee Nicole Good whose name I never knew
till this day, and this is the thing I’m
dying not to see, dying inside from seeing,
it’s not her whiteness, it’s her smile
and the video and the video and the video
and the gun and the phone and the dog
and the stuffies, her wife, three kids,
the start of an ordinary day and only
a couple blocks away.

I can’t remember whether I ate today, or yesterday,
really, or maybe tomorrow, and every time I close
my eyes—
I can’t—
two times, or maybe three, I fill up my cart
on Doordash, food enough for a week, until
I remember they’ll chase the Doordasher
through the streets and I don’t want to
lead them into the valley of the shadow
so now I’m back at the fridge.

If you can’t sleep, you can’t dream. If there is
one thing I won’t let them colonize, it’s my dreams.

When I was younger my uncle went to prison.
Came out with a deep interest in end-times
Biblical prophecies. He sat for hours,
thumb-smeared Bible on greasy denim knees,
talking about locusts and land wars and how
someday an abomination of desolation
would appear and after that, the nuclear
blooms would scatter the fields of the earth
to the winds with every ragged sinner left
on her or in her.

I’ve really come to hate—“White
Nationalist Pseudo-Christian” is far too
long for a poem, so in honor of my uncle,
who died younger than I am now, of AIDS,
I will call them Antichristians, instead,
and off in the ballroom distance their
Antichrist mutters at the wind, and I
think I’ve got time for one more cry
before trying to sleep again.

I can’t remember whether I ate after all.

Helicopters whicker overhead, familiar
soundtrack—I can still tell Huey from
Cobra from Blackhawk from Chinook from
the sound of rotors slapping the wind—
but these are none of them, so I settle
and they slowly feather me into a dream.

It’s winter in Minneapolis and I can still
see her turning the wheel to leave.

I can’t tell anymore if I’m asleep, if this
stick-legged nightcolt is real, knock-kneed
and steaming, wobbly but growing taller
and stronger right in front of me.

They say the trick is look for a clock—
do the numbers make sense?—but time
has been broken since earlier this week—
was it yesterday? Was it tomorrow? I have
pinched myself bloody before and I know
it will never end this whatever, this day,
week, year, dream.

I’m leaving today, or tomorrow, or maybe
I’m already gone—going to find my people,
they’re everywhere, everywhere I look
someone is helping build the fire we all
will need to survive this Minneapolis winter,
frozen ICEbound hell, feverish white dream.

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