June 8, 2020

William Evans

SOCIAL EXPERIMENT IN WHICH I AM THE [BEAR]

At the dinner party
I didn’t want to attend
because these people
are from work, meaning
[overtime] without pay,
and one woman, newish
person in old money, ring
on her hand that could
lift a family out of the mud, says [boy]
I didn’t know you were
this funny, I didn’t know
you were a troubadour, a silk rousting
my ears and of course I am
paraphrasing because she can’t
really talk like me, a [writer] and all
except when she flexes and says
and I heard you write
poetry too, my [worship] you aren’t
intimidating
at all are you,
you’re as ursine as they come
and if you think
she didn’t really say ursine,
then you’ve never
seen a hunter try to aim
straight with one hand
while they offered
the forest’s gifts with the other,
and if you think I didn’t know
she thought I was once
a great beast neutered down
to [civility] then
you haven’t attended enough
dinner parties, and I wish
I had relevant facts about [bears],
how we are of the
few mammals that can see
in color, how we can be
vegetarians or carnivorous,
how even a shaved polar
bear is still black, but this time
I just laugh low
and hollow like a stolen growl,
I am already
on my hind legs after all, already
talking with my paws wide
as a preservation, my voice
shakes the leaves even
when I don’t plan on it, our lineage
traces back generations, but once
you’ve assimilated, who’s to tell
when you were [captured]?
Who’s to argue where the bear ends
and the circus begins?
There’s a world between
learning the song of one’s claws
against a new throat
and performing tricks
for anyone who bought
a ticket, but I did wash the mud
from my fingernails before
I arrived—I’m still
laughing, by the way, still
hoarding my teeth deeper
within me, I am a [library]
full of the times I yanked
something apart and the times
I went hungry
and the times I let my hair grow
and grow and grow
until I was a snarl of a thing
and I ate everything
the party could offer me,
like I could never
become full.

from Rattle #67, Spring 2020

__________

William Evans: “Much of my writing of late has been addressed as the other. I spent a lot of time working in corporate environments and managing the ignorant and incendiary things that people would say to me. The job was ‘eventful’ enough in that aspect, but the mask would completely drop in social gatherings where I was almost othered out of existence. This poem is specific to that, but generally to the sentiment of what it is like being expected to perform, constantly and often on demand. In that way, it seems that I was always auditioning for a thing I didn’t necessarily want to be.” (web)

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July 29, 2018

William Evans

AFTER HIS RACIST TWEETS ARE EXPOSED DURING BASEBALL’S ALL-STAR GAME, MILWAUKEE GIVES JOSH HADER A STANDING OVATION

What occurs to me, now two decades after I broke
the earth beneath me leaving second base, is that,
instead of an insult, I was perhaps a new god, having been
called something other than my name in a holy trinity
before, during, and after the game. It might have been
Groveport, or Lancaster, or any territory Ohio lays claim
to honestly, every town is different except for what they
will wield at you. I rounded third base, towards a litany
of nigger and nigger. How fortunate to have someone
waiting for you as you return home. How blessed to be
left to interpret your worshippers because they love you
enough to name you themselves.

from Poets Respond
July 29, 2018

__________

William Evans: “Through high school and my early college years, I was a multi-sport athlete, but I was a better baseball player than I was most other things. I learned to love baseball from my father, who ironically loved the game mostly in isolation that a young rural black boy has to. As my parents moved us up economically from neighborhood to monochromatic neighborhood, I found I was the only black baseball player on every baseball team. The fact that I was good probably saved me from being nothing more than a mascot during home games, but it made me an outright target in other school’s fields. The celebration of Josh Haden not only hit me hard because it felt like an outright dismissal of those that his hurtful words and rhetoric affected, but also as a reminder of just how American baseball is and always has been.” (web)

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November 17, 2017

William Evans

I SAY CATHEDRAL WHEN I MEAN GUNPOWDER

Over winter break, Frank put a shotgun
in his mouth and killed himself in his mother’s
home, which was not his home, but I can under-
stand not wanting to die in a place you’re not sure

will care for your bones after you’ve left them.
Maybe break is a generous word because I was
back in the home my father had left and I was 
never going back to school, but ghosts have 

a way of knowing where all keys are hidden,
what kind of pacification the most guarded
beasts will submit to. It is 2 a.m. and a person 
I have left behind is telling me someone I had

lived with is trapped behind the present tense
forever. Now it is four days later and I am
in my best clothes driving into Fairfield County
where I was once called nigger on the baseball

field, where I once needed a coach to walk
with me to the bus to avoid my own purging
and a teammate told me that it wasn’t because
I was Black, but because I was that good,

because I was not old enough to be two
things at one time yet. Frank loved Wu-Tang
and once argued me who had the best verse
on Triumph, but no one at this funeral knows

this story, at least not the part where Frank
once kissed my forehead at a party while
we re-enacted Ghost and Rae over the music
too loud for anyone to be truly sober that night.

There is a humming here, whenever another
mourner approaches me, with a trespass glare
and I hope that Frank knows that I came here,
again to a tree that looks at my neck and misremembers

gravity, to see him lowered into the world that
tries to claim me, each and every day. I don’t want
him to see me as brave, but to know that I, too,
understand what it means to walk into a cathedral

and hear every lock turn behind you, that the stained 
glass is sometimes just light born in a better neighborhood
and I can still smell the gunpowder you swallowed every time 
I startle a flock of birds, that will never again be still.

from Rattle #57, Fall 2017
Tribute to Rust Belt Poets

__________

William Evans: “I think being from the Midwest is a unique negotiation for a writer as I often find myself putting forth an idea that isn’t so much profound as it is making a statement of awareness for readers. I often feel that the aesthetic of many poets outside of the Rust Belt is an affirming action that confirms or reinforces what we may believe about the location already. In my part of the country, I think the writers are often defending their home. It’s a pursuit of not only relevance but of reverence of where our voice fits in the national conversation. This poem, ‘I Say Cathedral When I Mean Gunpowder,’ feels particularly Midwest when it encounters the shifting environments, hard-to-penetrate culture, and realities of what being in the middle of the country demands.” (website)

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