By Kevin Young
I am hoping
to hang your head
on my wall
in shame—
the slightest taxidermy
thrills me. Fish
forever leaping
on the living-room wall—
paperweights made
from skulls
of small animals.
I want to wear
your smile on my sleeve
& break
your heart like a horse
or its leg. Weeks of being
bucked off, then
all at once, you’re mine—
Put me down.
I want to call you thine
to tattoo mercy
along my knuckles. I assassin
down the avenue
I hope
to have you forgotten
by noon. To know you
by your knees
palsied by prayer.
Loneliness is a science—
consider the taxidermist’s
tender hands
trying to keep from losing
skin, the bobcat grin
of the living.
Kevin Young, "I am Trying to Break Your Heart" from Dear Darkness. Copyright © 2008 by Kevin Young. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Source: Dear Darkness (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)
Poet Bio
Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He studied under Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University and, while a student there, became a member of the Dark Room Collective, a community of African American writers. “I feel like a poem is made up of poetic and unpoetic language, or unexpected language,” Young said in a 2006 interview with Ploughshares. “I think there are many other vernaculars, whether it’s the vernacular of the blues, or the vernacular of visual art, the sort of living language of the everyday.” For roughly a decade, Young was the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. Young is the poetry editor of the New Yorker and the director of New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
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