Art Commission
Poem by DeeSoul Carson
In lieu of police, who shall I fear?
In search of a hope I could point to, I open my window
to hear the unseen chorus perching in the magnolia’s
verdant dress. The birding app identifies a whole choir
of gray catbirds & robins & mourning doves, cooing
through the early evening. To say their singing saves
me would be an exaggeration, but what music would
we have without their example, their flight and freedom,
their tiny miracles of breath and feathers? By all measures,
we were never supposed to exist, arriving to this world
an impossibility in a long line of things too good
to be true, too horrible to name and nevertheless
survive. What have I to fear, now that I’ve outlived
our species’ particular violences? See, now, these new
and glorious tongues we’ve fashioned for ourselves!
No need in this life for the language of our old
chains and containers. The bygone world
is a myth we have sprouted from, an allegiance
we have outgrown and abandoned. If we must
fear anything, fear the still air. A birdless blue.
Fear the moment before dawn breaks, the twilight
of a day you will only ever know once. Fear email
typos. Unsaved games. The voice you can barely place,
lilting as it told the story that once ferried you to sleep.
Was it your mother? Hers? Who dreams of you now?
When you wake, what do you remember?
I have been working on a series of poems, collectively entitled “FAQ at the End of Empire,” trying to imagine the afterlife of our imperial systems of governance. When dwelling on the topic of hope and the future, I turned back to this poem trying to imagine the afterlife of the carceral state, but couldn’t decide which direction to move. Naturally, I turned to the birds and the freedom they inspire. When I imagine a world 25 years from now, I am hoping for a world where all of my worries are small in the grand scheme of things, relatively harmless to the short fact of my existence, any of our existences. There should be no need for us to fear our state, or those charged to protect us, or each other.
DeeSoul Carson is a poet, educator, and host of the O,Word? podcast. For his work, DeeSoul has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the NYU MFA program, the Watering Hole, and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. His debut full-length, The Laughing Barrel, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in Spring 2027. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com.
