Late in the feature film 

When I turn the movie on, the young american hero’s
finally beginning to recognize himself, finally 
accepting that mystic cosmic ritual of post-almost defeat 

coronation with luscious synchronous sound 
roaring in the background. The music, more than 
the scene, is a coming

coal blue-green and muddy brown
waterfall out of sight up ahead. We (the plural anonymous) are
already in it, the pull 

already lifting the weight we felt. His smooth
touch made just rough enough by the tear of narrative. 
The gravel in his voice is sex. 

I’m just a gendered being sitting on the couch enthralled
and shook by my easy thrall in all of it. Watching
him with women, how expressions skim across 

bodies — now the rush picks up and I’m stuck 
in the final thirty minutes of
this feature, caught in my personal darkness, soaked

in my byzantine clutter of personal effects, their faint scent 
of a life before this one. Other times, people. All of it 
reminding me that I have come 

here along some far way through
relations and places, jobs and languages, scuttled blueprints 
of belief, paper-machéd to make memory — identity. The swelling 

hero on screen wants blood — but first: he must sit 
in a midday highway diner booth, must listen 
across from an oracular child

who dips a finger into a loopy maze, 
babbles and traces a path on a kids-eat-free placemat map
colored in busted crayon. Red. Yellow. Blue. Destiny

for the hero and child as characters, as actors, the crew workers,
producers, parents, agents and pages, etc. and me, plus
whoever else watches, whoever else leans

and loafs in their personal darkness, given over 
to the nighttime tick of anonymous revelry — all of us must wonder:
How did I get here? Did I choose this for me?

The answer matters less than the wonder,
collectively. I feel it. Here we are 
in some crescendo, swept up in the signature music,

fantastical, 
possibly 
deadly.

ξ

Aaron Coleman is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award; and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow, Aaron has lived and worked with youth in locations including Spain, South Africa, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kalamazoo. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, New York Times Magazine, the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. Aaron is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where his research focuses on the history and poetics of translation between Afrodescendant poets in Cuba and the United States.