Poetry by Susan Falco

Almost Dawn in The Bluff 
(When Chris Was Alive)

The Bluff is a neighborhood in Atlanta where the police and criminals have been quasi-coordinating over half a centurys to curate a sort of orderly anarchy, hard drugs sold with capitalist efficiency but excessive violence discouraged

Outside of day or night the air is thick, hazy
The pavement shimmers under street light,
walking the blocks in spiraling meanders
knife-flick eye contact asks the question.
A man looks, pauses with raised hand, appraising.
He tells me there is no respect for beauty here.

Stupidly you are unafraid here.
Dim shapes shift in the haze
every slumped form you appraise
your eyes flooding with want and light
as you hope towards your question.
You circle hungry, hopeful, meandering

as scarred veins meander.
There is no respect for beauty here.
Sick to death of the repetition of the question.
Spark fading in the haze
I can feel our cells dying, flickers of light,
even from within always appraising.

The last night birds circle above, appraising
the city street for scraps, night flights that meander
and pause to search for hunger’s cure in the thin light
The birds always know fear, as they know it here,
they sink and rise in the haze
their wings ask the air a hopeful question.

All the unspeakable questions!
The whore in the shadows appraises
us, maybe when Skyy is done with her trick, pre-dawn haze
sky. If we circle back, maybe, if we meander
back to here
if we beat the light.

But no one beats the light.
Those who question the abyss die here,
the sky appraises.
Beasts, we meander
outside of time in the haze

You’ll die here appraising
the question of blood’s secret chemical symphonies, off notes meander
in and out of the light as circling, you fade, a shadow melting into the haze.

​


Dear Burroughs

“the powder of the angels and I’m yours”
-Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets

“the devil knows his own”
-proverb
 
I see you surrounded by a choir of dead boys,
cocooned in poppy’s sap.
They are beautiful, the dead
 who carried your book in the back pockets
of their black jeans or tucked in their leather
studded and patched jackets.
They are young and you bask 
in the light of their bright faces.

Vampire, deathless one, you have sucked
their light in to you and it shines out of your dead skin
as burning wood releasing its captured carbon 
back to the stars.

You didn’t lie to us.
You taught us that dope marks your cells indelibly.
That heroin left a tattoo
in the blood
that broadcasts like a radar beacon:
we will always recognize each other.

Dope marks its host, a mark
that can be felt, sensed, smelled
over great distances
as polar bears can sniff the artic wind 
and travel hundreds of miles across the ice
drawn in by the scent of a distant whale carcass.
The mark never fades.

Burroughs, you pressed your arms through the prison bars
and the guards would inject morphine in your purpling veins 
pocked with abscesses
so they didn’t have to listen to your screams,
or clean up your shit and vomit.

Those were the days, you said.
Today guards would laugh and let
you thrash
your body against the damp concrete
trying to inflict a pain sharp enough to release 
the deep sea crushing pressure of dope-sick madness

In your time the guards
would let you masturbate 
moaning on the prison bench, 
a weak, sick, sad 
orgasm feeding your starving 
cells a grain of dopamine.

You pressed your arms through the bars and called to us
Come, come unto me,
I will take you home.
Look! Look who has come through my door:
Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker
Jimi and Janis
Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders, Dee Dee 
Ramone, Edie Sedgwick, Basquiat. 
Come rest with us,
twitching like dogs in our dreaming.

All our private dead are with you as well,
those whose names will grow over with moss and grasses.
The ones whose music will be forgotten as the survivors
shake their heads and say for shame.

Dear Burroughs, still calling the drugstore cowboys
and the trick-turning teens
and the skinny magic boys who vault balconies and slip
through windows and take
without shame.

Calling Jimmy Sparks hiding in the attic crawlspace trying 
for one last shot. 
The police are waiting below to take him
back to prison but he jabs
and jabs at his battered veins, 
crying in frustration, bleeding and begging
for one last shot
before they take him back.
They are merciful, they wait for him.

Burroughs, you wrote that heroin
makes the world small, that it
closes your sight like an aperture adjusting
until all the world is obscured in tunnel vision
until the shot is the only point of light remaining.
You knew you wanted to find a different way,
something that opened the aperture instead.
You never did.
Instead you called them to you
your choir of pale seraphim
nodding on the flat pages of history.

​
​

Susan Falco has a biographical essay in Ploughshares, which was listed among the notable essays of 2011 in Best American Essays and a flash piece due to be published in The Kenyon Review this winter.  She attends the MFA program at Florida International University, where she helps edit Gulf Stream Magazine. Susan also has been both an organizer and participant in the O, Miami Poetry Festival since it was conceived.