- Southeast Review
- Nov 9, 2021
- 3 min read
The Only Atlas We Need Is One Drafted by Children
I know, because a woman told me,
even a horse’s shoe against stone
can spark a fire that wilds too far.
All humans have forged in the embers
combusts, eventually. The copper busts
of men who believed only in genocide,
are common as clouds. The barrels
of 357s were born red hot, before
they tucked themselves into angry
mens’ waistbands. Yes, I only write
about my body because nobody
wants me to have one. This is not
a lonely life. This is the truth of all
people I have kissed, under the shade
of weeping willows. In Pennsylvania,
we are known to gamble our money
as much as our lives: scratch-offs,
Powerball, lifting rocks to wrestle
both king and coral snakes. Red
touching black, safe for Jack. Red touching
yellow, kill a fellow. Children in a forest
depend on verse, limerick, the iambs
of wind throbbing through birch trees.
Across the country, my desert family
drinks exclusively Pacifico, and grafts
the wounds of cacti—two species eager
to grow as one. This is all to say, most
people understand more about transness
than they let on. My small town let me
play baseball with the boys, let me
dodge the goose shit littering right field,
and let me lead off. All transgression
of gender permissible, if I batted over
.300, listened to 3 Doors Down, Creed,
and supported the war. What comes first,
the hatred, or the curriculum to teach it?
I memorized four centuries of papal
reign before the periodic table. I knew
atomic warfare before the atoms bumping
together to build it. I learned I was alive
before I learned how I became so—
parents all atomic and chaffing. Some
things are inevitable, like rain in April,
a teenager’s newfound lust, and disease
dancing through a child’s poorly tended
ant farm. Somewhere, a child is playing
cartographer in the woods—making
maps of worm writing. Somewhere,
that child marks the roads we should
have taken, in only tempura paint.
When My Fantasy Football League Asks Me
to Write a Poem about the Jersey Shore “Note”
I start by telling them, that in Pennsylvania, during the early 2000s,
the only light at night came from Walmart flashlights and the gentle
throb of heat lightning—casting shadows over hay bales.
Sometimes, on the weekends, spotlights shone out the back
of Chevrolets—deer and owls kept their eyes open. Beer cans
crushed into coins, rural currency. It was a simple time, though
everyone I knew was being abused. Twenty years later, my partner,
who only loves me and the New Jersey tides, sees heat lightning
for the first time from our city veranda, breaking like glass between
buildings. My partner pours out a glass of wonder. The air is hot
and delightful. Recipe is, as recipe does. All the world’s landscapes
make all the world’s humans. You should know the truth. When
it all ends, all we’ll have is the high tide, and the heat, and such
wonder for how we loved. Such wonder at what we’ve done.
A Poem about Batman
For Little Davy
My whole family is looking for dimes
on the ground so they can feel you.
They have a few dollars saved, and
even I keep a few, Roosevelt side up
on the mantle. It’s a small thing, all
those dimes. They don’t pay the bills
piling up on your father’s kitchen counter,
but they mean something—something
about the afterlife, something about
how family always searches, even when
everyone knows, maybe, the search
should be given up. But nobody quits
on you, Davy, not when you were alive,
or this February, as the second year
without you rolls around. Me and you
never really got along, but nothing
matters less when it comes to family.
We once watched the Chicago Bears’
tight end break his leg so gruesomely
that we reached for each other, hand
in hand on the basement futon. I will
remember you just like this, empathetic,
and feeling pain that isn’t yours to feel.
KAYLEB RAE CANDRILLI is the recipient of a Whiting Award and of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. They are the author of Water I Won’t Touch, All the Gay Saints, and What Runs Over. Candrilli's work is published or forthcoming in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and others.