Variations on a Modern Theme
I.
I often wonder how my death will be staged.
In the fated fatal mise-en-scène—
will I be running? Will my hands
hover high fifth
in surrender? Will I
lay splayed curbside,
rotting
like any animal?
Will my mother release a feral scream?
II.
All this death devours you. It attains cinematic quality. It traverses genre—suspense, mystery, horror,
action, romance, snuff. Searing: how the blood stains
even a photograph; how the blood saturates
our screens, our newspapers, our timelines, our minds.
You think, “I can’t take
another image.”
You say,
“I am full.”
The mind makes room.
III.
He is slumped over in a car.
His crisp white shirt is stained
a frightened cerise.
The stain is spreading. The stain
is spreading.
Metastasis.
IV.
The boy is falling. The car comes, then
the boy is falling. The shots ring, then
the boy has fallen.
Tyrone S. Palmer is a Brooklyn-born writer, scholar, and editor, currently based in Chicago. His work has appeared in a number of venues, including The New Inquiry, Gawker, Muzzle Magazine, Critical Ethnic Studies, and The Offing. His mini-chapbook, engulfment:, was published in 2016 by Platypus Press. Tyrone is the co-founder of the publishing collective True Leap Press, and an editor of its open-access journal Propter Nos. He is currently a PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern.