CELESTIAL HAIBUN

In moonlight, Black boys look blue

- Barry Jenkins

The moon orbits around the earth in a motion that mimics the cycle of life. A circle of light that wanes and waxes to repaint the body again & again & again.

Maybe on a waxing crescent the Atlantic sloshes in our skin deep blue. Cyan blue. And the color will show us how to spill our bodies onto the shores of these new lands; but nothing tells us how to lap at the feet of monsters and cleanse them into men. So we wait. Let the cosmos shift and the stars regroup. The sun aligns with dead stone and breathes the fire of life into it once again. Perhaps the first quarter shades my brothers royal. Opulent hues that cry “Long live the Queen!” And the waxing gibbous makes my sisters Caribbean— hot and hurricane skinned. Licking salt and sugar cane off their lips to whisper:

Santo Domingo. But time passes and the world still turns. Light gives way to darkness which gives way to light once more. And a full moon’s pregnant belly will illuminate every plane of the body indigo. Purple-blue bruises that bloom across the abdomen. Stain our fingertips rich and dark as we bend to collect the life we have cut down. The sun dips below the horizon once more. I pray that before tomorrow the waning gibbous will turn us sapphire. Hard. Icy.

Flashing. And the third quarter will ignite my chest in denim flames. Waning crescent, make us as azure as the Lord’s troubled water. New moon, hush the hues our skin sings.

***

Heaven shifts above—

God rolls over in sleep & turns his back on us.

Silent digital photography

Half Life

A green sign welcomes me to Nebraska, the Home of Arbor Day, but I haven’t seen a tree since I left Indiana this morning. Ten hours of rolling across Illinois on I-74 and Iowa on I-80, and only corn stalks have broken the endless blue horizon. I’ve been driving with my sun visor down so I don’t feel so lost in all the blue. Corn on the left, corn on the right. Soy on the left, soy on the right. But no trees, so Nebraska might be lying to me. I’d like to pull over beside the Missouri River, uncap my giant Sharpie, and fix the sign so it tells the truer truth. “Nebraska: 7 Million Cows Slaughtered Every Year!” or “Nebraska: Home of 1.8 Billion Bushels of Corn!” or “Nebraska: More Cows Than People!” But I don’t want to be rude. I just got here. This summer, my job is to grow vegetables in two community gardens belonging to Together Omaha, the food pantry where I’m serving as an AmeriCorps member. The west garden is thriving. Twelve raised beds sprout zucchinis as long as my forearm, yellow squash that I swear weren’t there when I harvested yesterday, patty pan squash that swell into spinning yellow and green tops after heavy rain. The dinosaur kale grows like palm trees, especially when I pull the leaves from the bottom of the stalks, just like Nicole shows me as she leans over the bed in her knee-length khaki shorts. Tomorrow, Toni will exclaim through the two surgical masks she wears inside and outside that she can’t believe the leaves have grown so much—Nicole and I scalped them just yesterday! The carrots shoot their mint green feathers into a canopy that shades their orange and yellow bodies jostling for space in the soil. We’ll have to thin them out tomorrow, Nicole says. She threw handfuls of seeds into the dirt last month before Toni and I arrived, hoping that some carrots would grow long and thick enough to pile on the produce cart inside the pantry. She knew that some would only grow into nubs, but that’s how it has to happen. Some will live, and some will get ripped out of their beds by hungry gardeners.

I forget about the cows until I drive north on I-80 and pass the billboard of a political candidate wearing a brown leather coat and cowboy hat, smiling as a herd of black cows watches from behind, yellow tags dangling from fuzzy ears. He says he is a true Nebraskan, committed to true Nebraskan values: faith, jobs, and family. He doesn’t say if the cows are Nebraskans too. He doesn’t tell us if the cows pray as the sun sets or flick their tails toward heavenly shooting stars. He doesn’t tell us how it feels when cold metal squeezes the udders of the mothers, siphoning the milk that will never reach their babies’ stomachs. He doesn’t tell us these cows are only three years old when they walk into the slaughterhouse, that they could live past twenty, that their muzzles could match as they turn gray. He doesn’t tell us that these cows are Nebraskans too.

Across 33rd street, the sun withers most of the plants in the east garden, but the collards love it. We scalp them every other day, snapping the foot-long leaves off the bottom of their stalks as Toni collects a bundle for herself—she can’t believe she used to pay two dollars at the grocery store for five leaves! The collards fill four beds and share two with Brandywine tomatoes and bush beans. The beans are ready to harvest when the green pods measure four inches and are so plump our mouths water. I perch on the edge of the bed’s 2x6 plank walls, snapping beans off their little green stems and tossing them into the harvest tray next to the handful of Green Zebra, Stupice, Valencia, and Big Beef tomatoes I pick from the plants that reach outside their Florida weave no matter how many layers of plastic twine we trap them in. The Cherokee Purples and Brandywines aren’t producing much fruit. One vine from each set of four has only reached the first level of twine, but I don’t want to rip them out yet. They could still have half their lives left.

I forget about the cows until Toni and I toss chunks of their bodies into the repurposed banana boxes the pantry has been distributing to customers for the last fifteen months, ever since the day in March 2020 when neighbors could no longer shop next to each other without breathing contamination in and out. The pantry managers tell us that we’re pushing chicken today. Each box gets two Styrofoam packages of chicken breasts, two hunks of ground beef, and two tubes of sausage. We pull boxes of chicken from the stack on the pallet, and as I lug the boxes of bodies, I remember the chickens I’ve carried at a farm animal sanctuary. They weighed me down like newborn children, their bodies not designed to live past slaughter weight, the weight of the breasts that I stack in boxes for those who can’t afford to remember. Once the banana boxes are full of plastic-wrapped flesh, we sprinkle in oranges from Brazil, asparagus from Peru, grapes from Chile, avocados from Mexico. We Tetris the remaining space with sugar-laced cereal, dinner rolls flavored with high fructose corn syrup, and excess mini pies that the Walmart bakery section would throw away if they didn’t get a tax write-off for donating to the pantry. At the end of the day, the remaining bread collects in a cardboard watermelon container. A truck driver will transport the bread to pig, hog, pork farmers, who don’t always take the bread out of the plastic bags before churning it into the slop along with corn, hormones, pork, soy, and antibiotics. Pigs will eat anything, and time is money. When God called pigs unclean, he didn’t know how much a package of pork would sell for.

The pepper plants produce, but not without complaint. Every day, I pluck a couple two inch Padróns and green jalapeños, firm like rubber, and gather the long and skinny Jimmy Nardellos, whose yellowish-green bodies have fallen on the soil that seems too sandy and dry, even after two trips from the water tanks, stepping carefully to avoid sloshing too much water out of the cans. The Poblanos are giving up on themselves. Whenever I find one, a brown patch is almost always spreading outward, softening the deep green skin with rot before they’re half as big as they could be. I pick them anyway, hoping someone will remember to cut out the rot. The tomatoes must have an infection because the blossoms on their bottoms are leaving rotten patches behind when they fall into the soil. Nicole says that we should sanitize our pruning knives in between beds so we don’t transfer the disease. We usually forget, but we think the curse is in the soil, the compost that Nicole speculates doesn’t get hot enough to kill the weeds—how else could there be so many? But we use the same soil in the west garden, and we only have to weed those beds once a week. After our lunch break, Toni and I trudge back to the east garden, pruning knives and trowels in hand to dig out the weeds that Toni swears she pulled up yesterday—you’d think no one was weeding out here! The bindweed holds its ground, daring us to dig further; we still won’t find its root. Sometimes it’s bluffing. When we pull the white tendrils gently enough, they slide up the soil holding on to their dirty root balls. But sometimes we misjudge our strength, and the shoot pops, taunting us with the clean break because the roots have won. They’re stealing the water we carried all the way from the water tank, and they will snake their way toward the sun in the morning, sticking their green spade-shaped faces in our dirt-smeared ones, teasing the tomatoes with the nitrogen they’ve stolen from the vines.

I forget about the cows until I drive home from pickup volleyball with my windows down, radio turned up high enough to hear over the wind blowing in my ears. Just before US-75 turns into I-480, I choke on the slaughterhouse breath of raw hamburger, soaked in bloody iron and kicked through crumbled black July asphalt, steaming from the heart that still pumps heat. It’s a reflex. The heart doesn’t know its body is hanging upside down, split in half, skin peeled off the muscle like a bandage. I roll up the windows and breathe in through my mouth, out of my mouth, apologizing to the sacrificial calves for our sins. How do we forget? There are so many slaughterhouses in Omaha. I’m sorry I forget. A couple minutes later, I pass Vinton Street, and I test the windows. All clear. In through the nose, out through the nose.

Toni and I miss the okra blossoming. We desperately planted the second round of black seeds in the rain when the original ones weren’t sprouting. We keep giving them chances, and eventually they grow, half with wine-red stems, half cucumber-flesh green, spreading their leaves as big as my palm to protect the bed from the sun that strengthens each day. The fruit doesn’t look like the finger-length okra I’ve eaten before. These are wide as the circle made between my thumb and pointer finger, decagonal shooting stars, almost neon green, hard as comets. When Nicole finishes her AmeriCorps service term, she leaves Toni and me in charge of the gardens, but we think the red and yellow flowers bursting out of the canopies will morph into the fruit like the squash and the cucumbers, so we neglect the okra as they grow into inedible monsters, thick enough to crack when I bend them and to thump when I drop them on the 2x6.

On my last Friday before I drive back to North Carolina, I comb the okra forest, sawing off the bizarre offspring. During the extermination, I find some that exhale when I squeeze them and that match my middle finger in length. Toni and I divide these into paper bags and place them on the produce cart, beside the tower of Guatemalan bananas that creep toward the compost as each day decomposes the yellow into brown. I try to save the bananas, but my freezer is only so big, and I can only eat so much banana ice cream before my brain freezes. Nicole, Toni, and I make liquid fertilizer from three boxes of bananas, hoping to capture the life from the decaying pulp and siphon it into the withering cucumber plants in the east garden who can’t climb a trellis to save their lives. We strip the bananas, cut the peels into square inch pieces, and toss them into a bucket full of water that will absorb their potassium. I dump the fruit into the compost bin with a potent sticky-rottingfruit-baking-on-asphalt-in-the-Nebraska-sun smell. At least you’ll become soil, I tell them. You didn’t travel here from Guatemala for nothing. I don’t tell them that someone would have eaten them in Guatemala. I don’t know how they prefer to die and resurrect.

I forget about the cows after a day in Lincoln, a tiny college town compared to the sprawling Midwestern metropolis of Omaha, one of the only places in Nebraska without corn and soy on the left and the right. Emma, another AmeriCorps mem- ber at Together, shows me the gardens of her alma mater, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We ogle the tomatoes, squash, and kohlrabi in the raised beds and the curtain of hops growing in vines along ropes that almost kiss the grass. I wish I had come to Nebraska for college until we walk past the acres of pastures where students learn to raise cows and pigs, beef and pork. After fawning over patches of cornstalks and sunflowers, Mom texts me to “Give me a call when you get a chance.” My lungs implode because, whenever she texts this, I’m afraid someone has died. I slip my phone into my pocket as Emma and I walk beside the river that is a trickle after swimming in the Missouri. Breathe in, isolation. Breathe out, contamination. Just breathe, it’ll be okay, no one died.

On the way back to Omaha, Emma and I stop at her parents’ house. They send me home with a bag of cherry tomatoes from their garden and a young spider plant in a green plastic pot. Back home, I set the spider plant on the counter in the sunset beaming through the kitchen’s seven windows. I drizzle her soil with water and stare at this fellow life form, my elbows propped on the counter, chin cupped in my hands with dirt-stained nail beds, breathing and thinking about how she is breathing too. I text Mom, “I’m home now. Free whenever you are.”

She calls me. Dad is also on the line. They are at Myrtle Beach, and they got some bad news today. She doesn’t know how to tell me this. Tripp Sanders, my high school youth pastor, killed himself. The rot had reached the seeds and the stem, and he’d fallen into the dirt.

I go to the gardens the next morning. The beds are full of weeds that Toni swears we pulled out yesterday, so I can’t miss a day and let the weeds steal more oxygen from the peppers after they took it from Tripp. Plunge the pruning knife into the dirt. The weeds killed my friend with floppy forehead curls and eyes that listen to my words like nothing has ever been so important. Push down and wiggle the blade. The weeds killed my friend who buys a basket I make out of plastic bags to display in the house where the youth group worships God. Slice the roots. The weeds killed the first man to tell me he is a feminist, who teaches me to trust myself, who says he loves me when I leave the church. Yank the weed out of hiding. The weeds killed my friend who wears sun visors and tucks his scrubs into his socks. Wrench open the compost lid. The weeds killed the man who freestyle raps about Jesus in front of the congregation and lets me forget my shame. Hurl the weed into the darkness. The weeds killed my friend who closes his eyes when he sings and stretches his hands toward his creator. Plunge the knife into the dirt.

I can’t sob until my sister holds me. Four days have passed since Mom called me, but I don’t trust the cucumber vines to carry my cries to heaven, demanding that Tripp be returned because we have so much left to talk about. When Charis flies into Omaha from Atlanta, I take her to the Together gardens and introduce her to all the plants. She holds the twine while I wrap another level of Florida weave around the garden stakes, ensnaring the tomato plants succumbing to gravity after heavy rain. We drive home, and I am no longer alone in my empty apartment, so I set down the knife that is chopping broccoli and fling my arms around her shoulders, spilling the grief down her shirt, retching the chunks of despair up with the snot and the spit and muffling the mammal sobs with her tissue. I hang onto her frame like a tomato plant bending toward the earth in a thunderstorm, clutching the twine as my roots burst through the soil.

The next morning, Charis and I watch the livestream of Tripp’s funeral. The pastor reminds us that weeping may be for the night, but joy comes in the morning, and I remember the cows, who travel from feedlot to slaughterhouse at night, only visible through the metal holes in the eighteen-wheeler when the Iowa moonlight reflects off their Nebraska eyes. The bush beans will absorb the sunlight that the cows will never see, the morning they will never breathe. Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning. Hallelujah for the joy, but there is no joy in the morning after the rot in Tripp’s mind reach for a gun, and now his life is half of what it was supposed to be, and most of us didn’t get to say goodbye, and his kids have to live without their dad, and Jen has to lie awake in bed alone, and who knows how many of the mourners at the funeral will keep voting for bullets in brains and stun guns in foreheads because it’s their God-given freedom to fill the earth and subdue the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and be proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free hallelujah for the joy don’t tread on me don’t take my guns from me I live for God and God lives for me hallelujah for the joy lift your eyes toward heaven with no more death and no more tears with thoughts and prayers and praise God and hallelujah for the joy for joy comes in the morning, joy comes in the morning, hallelujah for the joy.

In the morning, we remember Tripp, and we weep.

We weep as we drive down Missouri, across Kansas, and back up to Omaha. When we climb the crest of the prairie preserve in Wamego, we stretch our sweaty hands toward the cows gathered behind a fence with yellow tags dangling from fuzzy ears and hope that the babies get to drink their mothers’ milk and flick their tails at countless Kansas moons. Once we leave Kansas City and Topeka, all we see is corn on the left, corn on the right. Soy on the left, soy on the right. Charis has never seen the endless fields of corn and soy that create the beings, then bodies, then meat that she hasn’t eaten for most of her life. Corn everywhere we look, corn everywhere we breathe. Slaughterhouses sheathed in green. Breathe in, pesticides. Breathe out, carbon dioxide. In, ammonia. Out, methane. In, reach for the sky. Out, dig a grave. The Nebraska sun is finally winning. I pull on my gloves and rip the yellowed and shriveled squash plants out of the soil, the tiny spines scratching my bare arms that this sun has failed to burn, even though I always neglect to apply sunscreen, forgetting that skin cancer could cut my life in half. The cucumber plants refuse to live no matter how many watering cans of banana water they drink. They join the piles of tomato plants from last season in the garden’s compost, divided into five sections by wooden pallets. They’ll break down when they’re ready. Nicole says we shouldn’t put weeds in these piles. They go in the sticky green compost bins, destined for the industrial temperatures necessary to break them down. If the Nebraska sun can’t burn my skin, it will surely bow to the weeds who will resurrect and steal everyone’s oxygen.

Before I leave Omaha, I plant some seeds where the bush beans, squash, and cucumbers used to live. I choose broccoli, green onions, carrots, and purple cauliflower so the produce cart in the pantry will have some color between the browning bananas and refined white Costco bread. Toni is staying three days after me. I hope she remembers to pick the okra when they’re as long as her finger and to pull the suckers out of the tomato crevices. I hope she remembers the cows and the chickens and the pigs. She says she will—now that she knows how to cook collards without meat, she might have to become vegetarian! When Toni leaves, Hannah takes over the gardens, but I fear the plants will droop and whither under her care the moment she mistakes the collard greens for giant spinach leaves. She’s from Omaha, so I hope she’s dug in its soil enough to know that she has to scalp the dinosaur kale and thin the carrots, even if it breaks her heart.

My spider plant rides in the passenger seat as I drive through Iowa and Illinois toward Indiana, and we count every animal transport trailer we pass. 10, 20, 30, 40. All driving toward Nebraska, Home of Collard Greens That Love the Sun and Tomato Plants That Try Their Best, Home of Corn and Cows and Corn and Cows. I try to look through the metal holes, waiting for the sun to shine on the eyes that will not see the next morning, but they’re too far away, speeding in the opposite direction, and the blue sky is filling my eyes because I’ve forgotten to pull down the visor. I look ahead. Corn on the left, corn on the right. Soy on the left, soy on the right.

At my parents’ house in North Carolina, I rush the spider plant inside for a drink of water. Her tips have browned and yellowed in the three days that we’ve been driving with the windows down. I forgot that her leaves are thinner than my skin and burn faster than weeds under the highway sun. She will stop trusting the sun, and in a month, I will toss her remains into the woods after withering under the sparse rays that peek through my bedroom window. Good thing Charis talked me out of naming her Tripp. A second half-life wasn’t worth another death. For now, the unnamed plant drinks while I walk barefoot down the wooden porch steps and over to the garden that has sprouted in the backyard, cantaloupe and butternut squash that must have grown from the compost Dad turns in the broken black bin that leaks earthy brown garbage juice. Mom is furious. She has sworn off gardening since our dog Gracie keeps plucking tomatoes off the vines and scattering them on the ground. I guess the North Carolina sun insists on pulling the life out of the seeds and toward the comets. They raise their hands skyward like Tripp, whose organs now inhabit new earthbound bodies. His corneas will absorb the rays of North Carolina sun, his lungs will breathe North Carolina air, and his new bodies will rejoice in the morning.

The rumble of vehicles cuts through the woods buffering the house from the I-40 asphalt where eighteen wheelers are carrying some of the pigs who outnumber humans in this state, their bodies made of Nebraska corn and Nebraska soy. My body is Nebraska tomatoes, Nebraska collards. Mexico avocados, Guatemala bananas. Nebraska morning, Nebraska night.

Inhale, forget. Exhale, remember.