Deon Robinson | The Virology that comes with these open caskets | Poets Resist

Deon Robinson was born and raised in New York City as the youngest of six children. He currently attends Susquehanna University as a Junior Creative Writing and Psychology double major. He was awarded the Janet C. Weis Prize for Literary Excellence for the 2018-2019 year.

Poets Resist
Edited by Jonathan May
June 22, 2018

Deon Robinson

The Virology that comes with these open caskets

in tribute of Andy and Jack There was one weekend I’d never forget it even if I turned 100/ That I went to four memorials; 2 in New York, the third was in Baltimore and then the last one was in Philadelphia / You would see someone one week, and the next they lost 60 pounds and then the next time you asked, they were dead / They called it the gay plague / It got to a point that we stopped picking up the phone at night because we knew what it meant / By the late 80’s none of our friends were alive to celebrate. — Andy and Jack

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i. no one should be teased with the idea of mortality, iii. there is no happily ever after because that implies you were alive to see it. v. bloody hands, a housewarming party for the dirt that made itself a resident of our fingernails. vi. the indecency of the world to refuse to hand you a shovel, yet watch you claw into the earth laughing maniacally at the way your grief scars. That you are left with an experience that’s exceeds that of a gravedigger vii. what is family if not the people who are willing to carry your casket, in a time when blood was less holy than water? No congregation sings from that pool of revelation, and this sermon has too many corpses in it to be comfortable. A memory so raw it refuses to let the ashes get cold. ix. speaking of the aids epidemic in past tense and isn’t that a victory? to speak of death like as if he is no longer eavesdropping on your conversations. xi. the blight was vicious, but here you have the time to remember, and that, that is the blessing of memory.

ii. the reaper of truth held a mirror to a suicide in slow motion. iv. or maybe death is what makes it happy, some people spend their whole lives running from their own bodies and ain’t that the truth of a dog running in circles. Not because it wants to catch its tail but because it knows the end is around the corner. viii. but here we are at this dinner table here you are alive in the flesh x. didn’t we come a long way from the graveyard, all the crossbones we had to follow to find our way out of that garden of corrosive damnation? xii. it cannot be used by those who are running, it is for those that ran. With each passing day, you learn how to pray the incantation of phoenixes using your own bodies, to birth yourself anew using the marrow of your bones into paper cranes.