No Matter What You Do
Love spins around the room again
& I wonder what it’s like
for Arthur Lee to always sing about always &
about anyways. Think it’s gonna go on as long as devotion
runs inside these rivers, might last longer
than the redwoods. There was singing before
devotion, too. You were small and shatterproof
in the pews, unaware of the sutures
keeping you together. I wonder what it’s like
for you now, giving it up to America every night,
real nice & real desperate. Meanwhile
there are still pressed palms & mouths open
for the body. Still fists strike, strike, striking
against chests for the sheer hope we end up
forgiven. Hope is what I tie my hair up with—
I twist it up, real high & real desperate. I want you
to ask me about the songs I’m picking
up. How really, it must have been the trees
who began the humming, the sound inside
the nation before it was a nation. I want to talk
about the trees like they’re better
than our God, how sometimes when it’s late,
I’ll mistake the protruding knots
on tree trunks for the lumps inside men’s
throats. They bulge out and keep promising
to create, and I can’t ever discern
one body from the next. But I won’t
mistake the humming, how we get on our feet
for it, and I want every song
about men keeping love inside their shirts
and standing up so straight, wanting someone
to lift them up like a window.
& I wonder what it’s like
for Arthur Lee to always sing about always &
about anyways. Think it’s gonna go on as long as devotion
runs inside these rivers, might last longer
than the redwoods. There was singing before
devotion, too. You were small and shatterproof
in the pews, unaware of the sutures
keeping you together. I wonder what it’s like
for you now, giving it up to America every night,
real nice & real desperate. Meanwhile
there are still pressed palms & mouths open
for the body. Still fists strike, strike, striking
against chests for the sheer hope we end up
forgiven. Hope is what I tie my hair up with—
I twist it up, real high & real desperate. I want you
to ask me about the songs I’m picking
up. How really, it must have been the trees
who began the humming, the sound inside
the nation before it was a nation. I want to talk
about the trees like they’re better
than our God, how sometimes when it’s late,
I’ll mistake the protruding knots
on tree trunks for the lumps inside men’s
throats. They bulge out and keep promising
to create, and I can’t ever discern
one body from the next. But I won’t
mistake the humming, how we get on our feet
for it, and I want every song
about men keeping love inside their shirts
and standing up so straight, wanting someone
to lift them up like a window.
Nailea Salazar is a writer from California whose work has appeared in Rejection Letters, Mister Magazine, Boats Against the Current, and more. She believes that God is stored inside Meg Ryan movies. You can find her on Twitter @brigittenailea.
Beaver Magazine 