Love Like Goths
When you are in love, the laundry goes unwashed
and mail collects like mold in a mailbox by the road.
Wallpaper unglues and slowly peels away like meaning from a word.
You are absorbed into the great unknown and the living
blacken their mirrors darkening a way to the land of Dis.
Your possessions, your favorite saltshaker, your albums,
your lambskin coat with the bone ivory toggles,
all stand like orphans in a corner of an emptied house
then find new homes where they occasionally recall the touch
of your fingers. Thunder is a faint memory.
When you are in love you ignore cutoff notices
and appeals to donate to PETA.
When you are in love, your blood brightens the veins
of an elderly man in Pasadena, who himself will
someday become a donor, and in this way your blood
will someday course through a child in Oaxaca.
When you are in love, dark wave compositions
charge the ears of those sitting solemnly at your funeral.
When you are in love, your works are a luxury to your family
who will study how you breathed between sips of oolong tea.
When you are in love, you gleam brighter than ever before.
Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023), The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems.
His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli.
A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.
He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.
He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
