Poetry by Rodney Wilder

                          ​corrine klug CC



On KoЯn’s video for Falling Away from Me & the tears

Jonathan Davis genies into the room, & the violence stops.
Jonathan Davis, pyramid-studded bellow-god to
welted children, lends this one his outrage, & the
belt never lands. & the bruise fades into a
nightfall of like refugees, each
this pentecost’s darkward fire.
& there they are:
the tears now two decades removed from their
terrorist soundscape. The muffled violences’
plastic-bag-over-face asphyxiant through which I
wring the prayer of being mothered & being
scared & made to listen. // The first to love me //
An anguish of bedroomed wounds. // The first to love me //
A nightmare of unfinished responses. // The first to love me //
                                                                                   The first to love me.
This is where I beg
the hated thing & his hands
away from my mother. Invoke
my pillow a lachrymal Rorschach,
speak in the held tongues of sonhood & panic as I
plead Jesus into this constant apocalypse. But
unlike the battalion-mouthed avatar
stomping domestic violence deceased beneath Pumas on MTV,
Jesus does not genie into the room. The violence
subsides. As eyes of the storm, shatter-swathed & promising,
always do. A slammed door Morsing the diabolist’s exit. & I,
boy momentarily spared turned salt at the fear of what
ineffaceable triptych these bedroom doors might be
protecting me from. & childhood,
nourished on & despite like this. Scrawling the ensuant
two decades like a seismograph lagged liar. Crier of wolf.
Because I can now say I love my father & mean it.
I can now be present without fearing a reason to dissociate &
shrink myself untargetable. Pray my mother unbattered. Hate 
her abuser unforgivable. I can code this terror past-tense. A fact
that does nothing to stanch what trauma would still
convince me I’m bleeding out from. Its pincer attack of
constriction & plummet; anger & depression, two
heads of the same limping beast. & these, the tears
upon revisiting a song I once hid inside like sanctuaried static.
The tears, evidence of being two decades gone & two
decades no closer to the bruise’s shelf-lifed fade. I remember
praying that Jesus would genie the wound a scar. I remember
Jonathan Davis roaring my terrified a womb of indignation, &
knowing that he raged on another’s behalf. A situated wrath
wailing shelter to my prayer for the savior. Where Jesus did not
opt for rescue, but instead, co-suffering,
wailed me held & endurant ember. My mother,
undouseable torchlight. A pentecost in the grievous making,
to be strewn, wounds & all, toward what other
bruise-dark nightfalls there are to be something to.
Where, despite the reverb still miming obsolete
hurts into belly & throat, I can call their echoes a chain
lived broken. Where the violence stops.
& me being here today.
& my mother being here today.
Is that not a kind of hand
genied to the rescue? In a way?

​

Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in places like FIYAH, FreezeRay, TRACK//FOUR and Poets Reading the News, as well as Stiltzkin’s Quill, his most recent attempt at grimoiring all the geeky incense left lit in his ribcage. When not fawning over his poet-friends at various Portland open mics, he likes analogizing things to Pokémon and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer. Find him on Instagram at @thebardofhousewilder.

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