DWB, Sauna
Christian J. Collier
Christian J. Collier is a 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow. He is an accomplished artist, public speaker, and educator who has shared the stage with members of HBO’s Def Poetry cast, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame members The Impressions, and Grammy-nominee Minton Sparks. Some of his works have been featured in The Guardian, and in such publications as Quiddity, The American Journal of Poetry, TAYO Literary Magazine, The Seven Hills Review, and Apogee Journal, to name a few.
DWB
Lately,
I’ve been thinking about how,
when I was a teenager,
I sat in a conference room surrounded by
other brown boys,
our eyes fastened to the glass face of
a television screen as the tape of Rodney King’s beating played.
The only sound there with us was the dry wheeze of the air-conditioner as we inhaled each strike
of
the black baton against his flesh.
The purpose of this, of our fathers exposing us to
the sight of a brown man being torn down by the angry hands of the police was to teach
us
a lesson about survival, about
how the unwritten set of rules that exist when driving while Black could be
what preserved our living breaths.
They wanted us to know how dire the consequences could be
if we ever found ourselves behind the wheel
& in an exchange with an officer of the law,
how
one wrong pant could be the last move we would ever have the chance to make
& that caution must be a second language kept, at all times, close
like the fine hairs hunkered on the cape of the neck.
Sauna
Here is what the white towel covering me knows:
I am afraid of death, yes, of tripping
out of life & beyond the speckled dark.
I taste a little bit of the grave each time my chest muscles tighten
& the next breath stands a mile beyond me.
I am afraid of the day my lips could reach
for it & only latch onto the three blank shells of an ellipses.
I know what it is to go without & I am afraid
I don’t know what squander means
when it comes to respiration.
I live ever in search of oxygen & waste none I find.
Asthma is the name of what eats away at me –
thief of the lungs that could one day rob me of you.
Breath is a temporary beast,
a frightened deer sometimes sprinting away & out of view.
Here, to tame it, I’ve formed
a refuge out of steam,
that boneless dancer that only knows
surrender, only answers to the flow of its limbs.
Inhale, then freeze. Allow the moisture to become medicine.
I cleave to the apparitions birthed by this heat & invite them inside me
in order to breathe, in order to not go
dead among the living.
Issue 10.1