Episode 52: How to Keep it Down / Throw It off / Defer Until Asleep - 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, where this poem comes from.

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.