Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

My friend Chris and I had just completed a shift. We were teenagers and it was a Friday. We spent a long day flipping frozen patties and salting vats of French fries. We were on our way to his house to play video games. About ten minutes into our walk, a guy approached us on a bicycle, telling us about an underground house party. Chris said, “Sure” faster than I could vocalize my exhaustion. He was super friendly and hyped up the emcees who were supposed to perform.

We followed him into a low-lit alley. We heard no music. Just when I went to tell Chris I was heading home, his eyes got big, and he took off. When I turned around the guy had a gun pointed to my face. It happened that fast.

I remember heavy steel on my temple. He ordered me to lay down and to slowly reach into my pocket and hand him all my money. His voice was raspy and quick. My heart raced. I thought of my little brother and my mother. I thought of my baseball team. People I wouldn’t see anymore. He poked the gun into my back and told me to count to a hundred, then I could get up. I heard music off in the distance. I counted. I didn’t make it to a hundred. I raised my body out of the dirt at thirty-three. I was changed.

As kids, me and my friends played war, both in video games and in the park. We had no sense of the fear that permeates places of armed conflict or what it meant to actually face one’s own death. We had no idea of the questionable acts, the moral descent and injury that accompanies war.

Today’s haunting poem, an embedded abecedarian, gets at the bizarre alter-reality of violence, how it distorts and impacts everything.

The Future of Terror / 1
by Matthea Harvey

The generalissimo’s glands directed him
to and fro. Geronimo! said the über-goon
we called God, and we were off to the races.
Never mind that we could only grow 
gray things, that inspecting the horses’ gums
in the gymnasium predicted a jagged
road ahead. We were tired of hard news—
it helped to turn down our hearing aids.
We could already all do impeccable imitations
of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on 
a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion.
That much was true. When we got jaded 
about joyrides, we could always play games
in the kitchen garden with the prisoners.
Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick
the Kidney were our favorites. The laws
the linguists thought up were particularly
lissome, full of magical loopholes that 
spit out medals. We had made the big time, 
but night still nipped at our heels. 
The navigator’s needle swung strangely,
oscillating between the oilwells
and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves
together by practicing quarterback sneaks
along the pylons, but the race to the ravine
was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.’s
and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight 
of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.

“The Future of Terror / 1 ” by Matthea Harvey from MODERN LIFE © 2007 Matthea Harvey. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press.