Published in Issue 63.3: Summer 2024
it had never been more evident to me than that night.
In the evening, I slid over to the main library to visit her
while I knew she was on the clock for work study.
Exams were coming up anyway, so I thought: why learn
a lesson alone when you can learn it with someone.
Hours earlier, helicopter blades sliced the black sky
above Abbottabad into fabric fit for funeral attire
with gunfire folded into the creases of the night.
For God and country—
so swore the Navy SEAL to his distant commander
watching from an electronic eagle eye.
When American Airlines Flight 77 breached
one of the five faces of the Pentagon,
my classmate’s uncle was killed:
that boy’s name was Luke, a biblical title.
Holy war had come to our one nation under God
as we pledge it to be in our classrooms, the one nation,
as we believe it to be in our hearts, and everyone
around me fell under the spell of a medieval impulse.
To that point, there hadn’t been enough blood
to wash away the curse that overcame my country
because it wasn’t his blood―until the day it was,
the headlines in bold like memorial wall engravings.
We were in the digital media center when the news
broke us. As the shock shook off, she and I
popped open my laptop and waited
for the president’s late-night broadcast to stream.
He said what one would expect
a president of the United States to say
when a page in history turns.
I didn’t linger on what his words were but on
how he walked: a solemn yet unmistakable swagger
in his bouncing shoulders, not a speck of dirt on them.
It was cool or it was chilling.
Or it was cool because it was chilling.
Or it was chilling because it was
cool, I hated to admit
to myself, discomforted by my own quietude.
I pushed the screen down and panned the scene
like a device with an aperture designed to intake epiphany.
I’ve opted to mute the footage in my mental archives:
everyone’s smiles were already in stereo; their teeth were
so loud―as loud as the world always says we Americans are
or how I imagine bombs must be when killing the innocent.
Purchase our Summer 2024 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017), Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021), and It’s Important I Remember (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). A Pushcart Prize winner, he has received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Cave Canem. He serves on the editorial board at Alice James Books. “It’s Important I Remember That We’re Not Bearing Witness, We’re Watching—” will be published in It’s Important I Remember and appears courtesy of Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press.
