By Terrance Hayes
The mouth is where the dead
Who are not dead do not dream
A house of damaged translations
Task married to distraction
As in a bucket left in a storm
A choir singing in the rain like fish
Acquiring air under water
Prayer and sin the body
Performs to know it is alive
Lit from the inside by reckoning
As in a city
Which is no longer a city
The tongue reaching down a tunnel
And the teeth wet as windows
Set along a highway
Where the dead live in the noise
Of their shotgun houses
They drift from their wards
Like fish spreading thin as a song
Diminished by its own opening
Split by faith and soaked in it
The mouth is a flooded machine
Terrance Hayes, a creative writing professor at Carnegie Mellon, received the National Book Award for poetry for his collection, “Lighthead.” The PBS NewsHour profiled Hayes in 2008. You can hear Hayes reading some of his older poems here at our Poetry Series.
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