"March 16, 2021" by c3 Crew
The Gnostic Gospels No. 4: a new poem by a Holy Gossip friend.
c3 Crew does the work. Like: would that all had Crew’s work ethic and patience with his poems. And, damn, are they felt, playful, and carefully cutting poems. We’re thrilled to be able to share one of Crew’s new poems with you.
March 16, 2021
by c3 Crew
The blood center works me in. I read my lesbian-necromancers- in-a-haunted-house-in-space novel, answer direct questions (was our Shandong trip within the last three years?) hide the cover from the butch phlebotomist. I race to get J, jazzed to be back at Chinese preschool now Grandma is vaxxed. We do our puppy pickup theater and J says they lost the walking rope and couldn’t dragon park or circle park. The truth? One whole year of inside recess. We hustle home just as the shooting starts— the first one, outside Atlanta. The monsters, as I call my kids, bicker as I sheetpan the dinner, brief E on the plan, walk our cabin fever koalas to the park. Spoiler Alert: one space necromancer was killed before we even met her. Which—fuck! I forgot the time difference. By dinner all eight people—six Asian women—were dead. Xioaje Tan would have turned 50 on Thursday. Was it her who fed the strip mall stray? This is reporting. This is all we know. I didn’t learn about it until bedtime— pulling the twitter thread, unraveling the new shape of our ravening country, three hours ahead of us— still ours. The 911 recordings— I can’t begin to listen— the dispatcher couldn’t understand where to send police. One caller wasn’t even there— she was asked to place the call in English. And I think again of J’s Chinese preschool, what they heard (Kung-Flu, China Virus, how the orbital bones fracture, slammed to the sidewalk) that I didn’t believe about my city. J runs ahead to the car— she’s so fast now— and I worry—it’s dangerous, being unseen. In the next chapter our hero is stunned— in a box, in her oldest frenemy’s closet, a disembodied head. We aren’t stunned. We kind of knew all along. Enough, anyway, to lie about it to our kids.
We just love this poem. Goddamn. How it moves, how it sings, how it weaves childhood’s joys and wonder through the terror of being human in America. Crew balances the speculative humor of “my lesbian-necromancers-/in-a-haunted-house-in-space” achingly against the real-world hate and violence of “(Kung-Flu,/ China virus, how // the orbital bones fracture, // slammed to the sidewalk).” The unconventional stanzaic form enacts a sort of energetic catch and release that becomes inextricable from the poem’s very being. Crew is, too, a marvelous breaker of lines: his line endings by turn suspend, propel, jar, halt, and quicken the movement of the reader’s mind across the page. “March 16, 2021” embodies what happens when a reader let’s herself slow down and be possessed by what—maybe—only a poem is capable of.
c3 Crew is a father, lunchbox artist, and downtime mender. His poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spillway, and The Sugarhouse, Cincinnati & Gettysburg Reviews. Yes, he does believe Cottage Core Space Operas are a thing, do you have time to hear about it? www.c3crew.com
Thank you for introducing me to this astounding poet.