Bildungsroman

By Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

A poem as a synch of pitching rooms
smearing memory like a wet brush
through watercolor—bright then fade to white
gesso and the arched gesture of painting

faint like children’s feet shuffling through the snow
to Taco Bell by the Payless. Barely
one year left of childhood—men say we’re grown.
We sing rap parodies to your turtle.

We steal thumb hole shirts from the white girl mall.
We wonder if we’ll grow up or if time
will simply stop. Our haunts have not matured,
the swivel stools still sway. Watercolor

strokes festoon the beams that garland registers
and counters in our lean queendom; a place
away from all our homes entail. Quiet
now in the approach of a storm, we feast

to foil, to glitter up lonesome guts
that seem, to us, our sole inheritance.
We Baja Blast with bent down lips. Twilight
hardens the snow to a glimmering threat.

Your father salts the I-95 at night,
while my mother’s boyfriend makes copper pipes,
my mother works at the brand new Target.
We think of these as premade lives removed

from glam or grandeur. We want to make poems
of ourselves; we want lush garlands replete
with azalea infernos, peaceful homes.
We want to govern the pitch of our rooms.

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Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet from Piscataway, New Jersey. Johnson is the author of SLINGSHOT (Nightboat Books), developed with support by Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund, Culture/Strike Climate Change and Environmental Justice Fellowship, the Rewire News Disabled Writers Fellowship, and winner of a 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. WATCHNIGHT (Nightboat Books), his second collection of poetry, received the 2023 James Laughlin Award. He was a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, the inaugural Poet in Residence at the Brooklyn Public Library, and a 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Johnson is currently finishing a novel called Male Girlfriend.