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Ode to the Midwest

By Kevin Young

The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
—Bob Dylan

I want to be doused
in cheese

& fried. I want
to wander

the aisles, my heart's
supermarket stocked high

as cholesterol. I want to die
wearing a sweatsuit—

I want to live
forever in a Christmas sweater,

a teddy bear nursing
off the front. I want to write

a check in the express lane.
I want to scrape

my driveway clean

myself, early, before
anyone's awake—

that'll put em to shame—
I want to see what the sun

sees before it tells
the snow to go. I want to be

the only black person I know.

I want to throw
out my back & not

complain about it.
I wanta drive

two blocks. Why walk—

I want love, n stuff—

I want to cut
my sutures myself.

I want to jog
down to the river

& make it my bed—

I want to walk
its muddy banks

& make me a withdrawal.

I tried jumping in,
found it frozen—

I'll go home, I guess,
to my rooms where the moon

changes & shines
like television.

Poet Bio

Kevin Young

Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He studied under Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University and, while a student there, became a member of the Dark Room Collective, a community of African American writers. “I feel like a poem is made up of poetic and unpoetic language, or unexpected language,” Young said in a 2006 interview with Ploughshares. “I think there are many other vernaculars, whether it’s the vernacular of the blues, or the vernacular of visual art, the sort of living language of the everyday.” For roughly a decade, Young was the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. Young is the poetry editor of the New Yorker and the director of New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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Meanwhile

By Richard Siken

    Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make
                            the new streets yours.
Trees outside the window and a big band sound that makes you feel like
     everything's okay,
  a feeling that lasts for one song maybe,
                 the parentheses all clicking shut behind you.
          The way we move through time and space, or only time.
The way it's night for many miles, and then suddenly
                                     it's not, it's breakfast
   and you're standing in the shower for over an hour,
                   holding the bar of soap up to the light.
I will keep watch. I will water the yard.
      Knot the tie and go to work. Unknot the tie and go to sleep.
                            I sleep. I dream. I make up things
   that I would never say. I say them very quietly.
                      The trees in wind, the streetlights on,
          the click and flash of cigarettes
being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight.
      It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
                                  green beautiful green.
   It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green.

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