Erika Meitner

Jackhammering Limestone

You ask about the leaves and I tell you it’s been so dry here

the leaves are just giving up, turning brown, falling off the trees,

which all look dead. This might be a metaphor for the election or

might be a metaphor for nothing—it’s hard to say. Each morning

I wake up to machines across the street jackhammering limestone,

shearing away more rock-face and turning it to rubble strewn across

red clay soil so dry it heaves and cracks. It’s been seven weeks of

drilling and blasting, drilling and blasting, and that’s not a metaphor

for anything either except maybe my mid-life crisis, which I’m having

surely as there’s whiskey next to me and I’m up all night wondering

if I can be hairless again in some risqué places. Most days I refuse

to believe we’re doomed, despite growing evidence to the contrary.

I mean, it’s like the 1970s down there. Trust me. Most days, I listen

to NPR on my car radio and talk to one son or the other in the back seat

and ask them questions they sometimes answer as we drive home

past the pile of rubble and the leafless trees, which vaguely resemble

the girl I saw on campus wearing an entire shaggy outfit made from

flesh-colored plastic grocery bags campaigning on an environmental

platform for student council president. Her amazing bag-suit was rustling

in the breeze and it looked like she might take flight, just soar over campus

with the drones delivering burritos this week as a test stunt because

our motto here is Invent the Future, which I think about a lot—not as

‘your future’ in the sense of what I wanted to be when I grew up,

which I figured out by process of elimination was not a banker or a

computer programmer, and I never saw myself as a mother either but

here I am. More like I would invent a future where my black son will not

get shot by police for playing in a park, or driving, or walking from his

broken-down car. I would invent a future where there was always

enough chalk to leave notes for the next class: We are starting a revolution

somehow; instructions to follow. What no one told me about programming

computers for Merrill Lynch to keep their front-end trading systems

running past Y2K was that I was simply a dominatrix of code; the disaster

that would take our building down came later, and had nothing to do

with language. My cashier at Kroger has an epigraph on her name badge

under “Paula” that says, “I Will Make Things Right.” I hope that girl

wins her election. I hope that someday someone else will enter my

hairless palace and find it marvelous. The photos of broken glass; the piles

of rubble. The future is throttling towards us and it’s loud and reckless.

Poem appeared in Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018).

Too strong

is what the announcer dubs Steph Curry’s

flubbed shot that bounces diagonally

off the backboard. This is game seven

of the NBA finals, and Cleveland goes on

to defeat the Golden State Warriors,

but we don’t know this yet, because

we’re still watching the game, jammed

into an alcove where it’s live-streaming

from someone’s laptop onto a wall at an

artists’ colony, since a surprising number

of writers and composers and painters

are basketball fans, so when the sports-

caster reels out descriptions of plays,

Nate the jazz critic says, “Someone should

write a poem called Too Strong,” and

Stephen Dunn isn’t interested though

he’s sitting behind me also rooting for

the Cavs, saying things like my goodness

and he’s the best closer for his size.

“You have to give the context in your poem,”

mansplains Nate, who points out that

‘too strong’ is a hyper-masculine way

of saying Curry basically just fucked up

the shot. It’s important to note here that

Cleveland hasn’t won a championship

in any sport since 1964—that’s a 52-year

curse in case you’re anti-math. I am well-

versed in the sadness of Cleveland—

skies hanging like lead most of the year,

husks of buildings, smokestacks pumping

raw flame over downtown. My husband

grew up in the sadness of Cleveland,

and we return there every Christmas to more

unemployment, more foreclosure, more

poverty, more shitty weather. When LeBron

left Northeast Ohio, my husband actually

burned his replica jersey in the yard, wouldn’t

mention his name for three long years of anger

and mourning. He uses Cleveland sports teams

to teach our sons about failure and perseverance,

with a heavy emphasis on the failure. But

here’s LeBron on screen, lugging his city’s

championship dreams like a bag of rocks.

Forget Tamir Rice, age twelve, gunned down

by police for being black, for playing with

a toy gun in a park, left to bleed out on a

sidewalk. Forget that Cleveland is the

poorest city in America other than Detroit.

LeBron’s stuffed this game with thunderous

dunks, fadeaway jumpers, and blocked shots,

towing his teammates along in his ferocious

wake. And when LeBron goes down in the final

minute of the game, writhes on the court

in pain after landing on his wrist we all

want him to get up—even the artists rooting

for Golden State. Get up, LeBron! Nothing

comes easy to Cleveland. The next morning’s

paper sports a photo of LeBron embracing

power forward Kevin Love, next to headlines

about Venezuelan food riots, triple-digit

temperatures in the West, vigils for

victims of the Orlando massacre, and

the Colorado woman who fought off

a mountain lion attacking her five-year-old

son—literally reached into the animal’s

mouth and wrested his head from its jaws.

Too strong. In the belly of fear and rust

and shame there is no such thing.

To pry open something with your bare

hands, look into the gaping maw

of the beast that eats your sons—

the lion, the bullets, the streets, racist

cops, heroin, despair, whatever is most

predatory and say, Enough—we will triumph,

motherfuckers. At the game’s end, LeBron

and the Cavs coach Tyronn Lue sobbed

without shame. “I’ve always been tough

and never cried,” Lue said. And LeBron

at the post-game mic, wearing a cut-down

net like a necklace says, “I came back to bring

a championship to our city. To a place

we’ve never been. We’ve got to get back

to Cleveland. We’re going home.”

Note: some phrases in “Too Strong” are taken from “Cavaliers Defeat Warriors to Win Their First NBA Title” by Scott Cacciola (The New York Times, 1 Feb 2015). Poem appeared in Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018).