Episode 087 REBROADCAST: How To Keep It Down - Justin Phillip Reed

REBROADCAST! In honor of Black History Month and because it's primary season and this incredible poem touches on presidential themes, we are rebroadcasting our episode about "How to Keep It Down / Throw It Off / Defer Until Asleep" by National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed.

Content Warning: Suicidality

Connor and Jack discuss a poem by this year's National Book Award winner for Poetry: Justin Phillip Reed. The poem, "How to Keep it Down / Throw It off / Defer Until Asleep," is from that award-winning collection, Indecency, published by Coffee House Press. We talk about the effects of the poem's shifting POV, the intersection of mental illness and white supremacy, and get to maybe two or three of the poem's nearly infinite layers on layers. Plus, Al Pacino makes a surprise cameo!

Read the poem below. More on Justin Phillip Reed. Check out his collection, Indecency.

How to Keep it Down / Throw It off / Defer Until Asleep
by Justin Phillip Reed

My stomach imagines itself as an injury.
I steep ginger-mint tea in the
inauguration memorabilia mug from Momma,
monument-white but for Obama.
Between self-harm and my hand, I’ve rigged a list
of reliable illusions. This is the first
gesture. I am a gentle fist. My body
has been deboned of its irony.
My life wants to be proven
to. I didn’t check the list of Black church dead in Charleston
for friend or cousin
because this morning it was Thursday. Work was quiet
after I asked a white girl if she could quit
whispering—the hissing hit

his reddest venous notes until
a droning rain applauded. His ears ring full
of answers to his own knocking
when he’s home alone—i.e., almost always. Pacing
the apartment for a nest in which to
knuckle shut and wax unknown, he
statues and envisions
both spread hands rooting a brown expanse
into the kitchen floor’s glaucous linoleum,
and after, the image on Instagram
with heightened contrast, hashtagged emblem
etc, and producing this proof
would require one of his hands, and what if—
Nearby in the drying rack, a knife

shines. Impetuous.
And it occurs to you that this
occurring to you is a thinner ice
than most other Thurs-
days, is skin quickly shucked off a winter’s
lip. The hour itself murmurs
open better yet back like a hang
nail, as in persistent rawness and in the wrong
direction. You hunker the mug sternumwise—
it’s hot as a kind of heart meat but a blanched blues
—and mother your torso around it like a
matryoshka
mold, chest sickled over the steaming vent
that is the President’s head, though you pretend it isn’t.