Poems by Dustin Pearson 

Autobiography
 
I was taken in by two wolves whose whole diet was bacon.
Each morning we shared the nine packs of bacon we fried then ran.
We ran so fast the woods stretched a band of evergreen.
 
We ran faster than life. We watched the nine-year-old flower girls
in the forest live out their whole lives. Each morning they lived
and before the end of our daily run in the afternoon they died again.
 
Their hair curled brown to fall flat-white, their skin opaque
before filling with light. Never mind the things they did.
I named my favorite Heather. Her life and death,
 
mere markers on the trail. We ran so fast the fat in our arteries
would expand then explode and collapse, spilling out and over
like liquid cheese. It smelled like bacon, bacon all fat and no lean:
 
a treat. Our hearts came up our throats and out our mouths so tasty
and we kept running. We were together and happy. We had everything
and we could keep it. We ran past our own deaths, and when we came
up on our hearts again we picked them up and swallowed them.
 
 
First published in “The Spectacle.”


 
The Left World
 
for Michael Torres
 
It was the sun
that rose us each morning
those few days
on the mountain,
wasn’t it?
Me to walk the dew-locked grass
that huge field
you preferred to run
first thing out the door,
the little house.
Remember, Michael?
We’d meet on the sidewalk
to head to breakfast,
the only two of us up
that early, first witness
to what the night left,
me always looking down,
you always looking in front
missed the crimson specks
in a row on the cement
I couldn’t help but think
was blood I’d follow
to a morbid, magic world
to swim then drown in.
Michael, I turned to you,
said, there’s so much blood.
There’s just so much blood
everywhere, we said.
At sunset, the clouds
fell early,
thick on themselves,
to the ground,
and like you, Michael,
I’d always wanted
to walk the sky,
so we went.
The mosquitos inside
were giant. We were
so unnerved
we itched twice
as much in our long sleeves
the number of their stealthy bites.
Why had we been laughing,
Michael? On the ground,
there’s everything to face
in the world that’s left, the world we left
in the clearing behind us,
and I get it, Michael,
you have more than yourself
to think about, but even so,
remember when I said
look at how the people
enter gently here
and are swaddled softly
off the horizon.
We confessed,
We could just
make off
into all that fog and
disappear.
 
 

Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, 2022), Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018), and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). In 2019, The Root named Dustin one of nine Black poets working in “academic, cultural and government institutions committed to elevating and preserving the poetry artform.” He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo where he teaches creative writing.

---

---