I brought two new poems, two brand new poems
that I'm going to make myself be brave to read.
I've never shown these to anybody,
never sent them out, never read them out loud.
So I hope that something comes after this book,
and I hope that this has something to do with it.
This poem is about people that go missing in your life.
Not just estranged, but literally go missing.
So it's about one of my cousins and about a high school friend.
And it centers around Dante of the Divine Comedy.
"The Thorn of Dante."
One of the final acts of Dante's life
was to place a single thorn into his ear.
He was invited to lunch by the Doge in Venice
where he was sent to settle a dispute about salt.
The thorn was pulled from the flank of a small baked fish.
When the Doge asked Dante why he did this,
He explained that this fish was from the Adriatic
Sea in which his father died,
So he hoped the thorn had a message
to deliver from he who Dante had lost at age 10.
By this logic, if I wanted to hear once again from my cousin
Karma missing for half my life,
Older than the rest of us, but always kind,
To whom my parents would not give money
when she'd knock on the door at the oddest hour
of the oddest day to ask for cash.
I'd hold my ear to a dime to hear where
she is, if she is still alive,
Or to know where Biko is, who the police wanted
to turn to salt.
So he vanished when we were teenagers
Who once told me he was scared of his own gun,
That he felt sometimes it could move on its own.
Decades later, his brother showed me a wooden wine stopper
he claimed Biko had made with his hands and vaguely mentioned
Texas.
For him, I'd listen deeply to the grain
of that wood I imagined he machined while reciting
Shakespeare like he did as we pulled weeds from my father
in his fields.
The news of the gun is found within what's left,
Is what Dante wanted to be true before his blood's last turn
near the marshes of Comacchio.