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    I.          On a graph I loved to understand in junior high,
                each July, people seemed to drown because of ice cream—
                lake water rippled with their bodies, wet sugar
                crystaling the life ring, the lifeguard licking
                the deep-end blue of a coconut popsicle, dreaming
as a boy waves—heat spike & sweet spike & splash of a body
creamed, as we used to say then: man, he creamed you
in that race; she creamed you at that free throw; I creamed the test
after I learned that two lines can climb a single curve
         sly & steady as the morning heat,
                                                               without causation:
         motorcycle wrecks & cheese; steak dinners & the gristle
         of lightning strikes; golf course profits & Nicholas Cage;
         spilled Diet Coke & bodies on the floor after The Dark Knight Rises;
or in the further future, after that pool party where the man
dials his phone (it is apparent [he] wanted his girlfriend to listen in), then
fires into the rubber backs of deck chairs, & then & then &
then & then & then & then & then
    II.          It’s so easy, you can do it yourself, on the back
                 of a napkin, BJ Campbell writes. He’s out to prove
                 everyone’s lying about the link between gun ownership and
                 homicides. He excludes the data-skewing stats
                 of suicide, police violence, accidents. Marks each
                 state’s guns & homicides as little dots. You’ll see,
                 he says, there’s absolutely no way you could draw
                 a line for any correlation; it’s far too scattered,
                 like someone shot a piece of graph paper with #8 birdshot.
    III.         Arkansas, where I was raised in heat that drove us to double-
                  dip ice cream cones for tourists, dip ourselves in motel pools—
                  sneaking through flimsy gates to their splotch-&-foot-scald
                  edge—ranks #5 out of all the states for gun deaths.
                                                                                                   Coincidental
                  to a July 4 on which at least six people were shot in the Little Rock area
                  comes. . . a survey that shows Arkansas No. 2 among the states
                  in the percentage of adults who own guns.
                  Coincidental,
                  which meant originally, to fall upon together.
    IV.         The man who wanted his girlfriend to listen to him, listen
                  to him, held a cell phone that killed no one by a pool chair
                  that killed no one, by stripy towels & sun-
                  screen, pool noodles, paddleboards
                  too small to be gurneys. You could make a dot for each item
                  on a paper napkin. You could look away
                  at confounding factors. Mental health. Video games.
                  Freedom. You could draw dots until they cluster like stars
                  on the flag for an impossible country
                  that hasn’t heard of constellations. Pool towel. Pool noodle.
                  A history of rage & isolation. Some people are just lonely. You can pile
                  dots like Dippin’ Dots at the ballpark, at Worlds of Fun—
                  cream plus liquid nitrogen—ice cream made into
                  individualism. There’s no winged horse in the sky; no dipper
                  but this metal in a teenage hand. You can wipe
                  your mouth on the napkin, say doesn’t always equal
                  means never equals. You can forget cigarettes & lung cancer,
                  air bags & seat belts & survival in collisions. Before
                  an American invented it, who ever dreamed
                  of beaded ice cream? Who imagined this hate on a sunny day?
    V.          In the duke’s palace in Urbino, Italy, sculpted
                 into the door lintels (his guestrooms, his parlor,
                 his own wife’s bedroom) acorn-shaped jellyfish
                 dangle plaster tentacles—tidal & poisonous
                 & painted gold. Their flamelike drift
                 inexplicable in inland Umbria
                 until the art historian explains they aren’t Ulmaridae at all,
                 but early Renaissance grenades: petards in mid-explosion
                 like tentacled rocket ships. Federico’s motto,
                 Ich kann verdauen ein grosses eisen:
                 I can swallow a big iron, reboasted in their vaulting
                 each door each guest had to pass through—
                 the non-ornamental ornaments of power
                 impressing that even he, humanist, philanthropist, was a force
                 not to fuck with. Their high-tech threats
                 floating through dreams, streaming like rampage & carnage
                 & America’s deadliest summer on record, which finds me even here
                 this summer, which is ending as it began. . . this month’s loss of life
                 most acute in Texas—acute, which no longer & maybe never meant
                 the opposite of chronic, but something like terror
                 becoming ever young again. Becoming near
                 transparent & proliferate as moon jellies
                 I thought once, swimming off the coast, were innocent,
                 like living soap bubbles
                 until a single tendril slipped across my lip.
                 That vanishing point
                 (new still in the Renaissance too) where perspective
                 begins.
    VI.         And if there is a reason, the preachers say, it is God
                  exiled from the school; God
                  who wants to sit at His swiveling
                  chair-desk as the bell buzzes, as the teacher flips the lights
                  on like the fourth day. God
                  who wants standardized tests
                  & pink erasers & the hearts of each American. Twizzlers & tater tots &
                  obeyance of metal detectors inside &
                  outside the heart. God who wants social science & civics
                  classes on the Second Amendment He gave this country
                  to save its people from Tom-Petty freefalling
                  people with their souls mixed up like pop rocks & spit, that crackling
                  on the tongue, those sinners who never learned to call God’s name
                  like a roll call, never asked for Him
                  to sit beside them in Earth Science
                  after He created this very Earth,
                  never bowed their heads or bubbled in the True-Right answers
                  of a) God b) God c) God
                  d) Damn the rest of them; the preachers say,
                  if teenagers are dead again in a school today
                  it’s for the root cause of Godless, depraved hearts:
                  this country’s impenitent desks, the simple subtraction
                  of opening to chapter five, when God wants
                  His own words to crack the spine
                  of every morning. Let every patriotic American
                  have the right to hold a gun, God says,
                  & they do. Let me use my big pink eraser to rub out danger, God says,
                  or He could have.
    VII.         
                      and informs the meaning of the remainder of its text. . .
                      ‘it cannot be presumed that any clause in the Constitution
                      is intended to be without effect.’
                                                       from the dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller
                  A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security
                  of the sweatpants rack at Walmart, to a festival
                  of artichokes & fresh-fried garlic, to a man sloshing
                  a Manhattan under dance-floor strobes, to a bank lobby,
                  a synagogue, a pool party, a bipolar man in his room alone; a well-
                  regulated militia being necessary to each individual
                  knuckle on the man’s fist knocking against another man’s
                  windshield at the Stinker Station by the hardware store
                  where the LED sign flashes ads for Festival Dance at the university,
                  the parking lot Gem Show, their own Enhanced Conceal-Carry class;
                  a well-regulated militia being necessary to the fingers &
                  whole bald palm of that hand now covering the glass,
                  his face leaning in to shout, go back where you came from, N—.
                  If I was carrying this morning, I’d shoot you. A well-regulated militia
                  being absent, my friend, a colleague of that you, calls the police,
                  says, he was on his way back-to-school shopping; his daughter
                  was in the car; he’s Pakistani; he was scared to call. A well-regulated
                  professor/first responder being necessary for the free State’s
                  classrooms where they teach, where I teach, three miles across the state line,
                  but still in America, we know about absolute clauses
                  & causation: Speed being necessary to stop someone from bleeding to death,
                  your shirt, paper towels, Kleenex, whatever you have
                  can be used to staunch the blood flow. Or, a well-regulated
                  back-to-school list being necessary
                  to succeed in third grade, which does not mean, and is never
                  made to mean, that we each need small plastic protractors
                  & lunch boxes & Hello Kitty erasers—
                  although my younger cousins’ list in rural Texas
                  includes laminated name tags on lanyards
                  they have to wear now daily, they tell me, in case
                  a body count needs to be regulated.
   VIII.        I was raised in Arkansas in a family-that-did-not-own-guns
                  that owned a gun. My mother kept it in her dresser drawer
                  wrapped in a scarf like the one she wore on rare days she pinned
                  her hair in auburn knots. Those latent curls. Latent shimmer
                  of its mother-of-pearl stock in the winter-shirt-wooled dark
                  as she & I fought & cried, as my boyfriend/foster brother
                  punched himself square in his eye—those rings of purple-black
                  like a wayward planet. He hadn’t been diagnosed yet. We never
                  said bipolar ran in our family. I gave a speech as valedictorian:
                  Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but advancing toward what will be
                  with him, swollen-eyed behind me, my own bruised ribs forgotten
                  before they even happened. Latent, from ladh, hidden, relative of lethe,
                  the river we swam, forgetting the bullets, the nylon scarf,
                  the hurt we were capable of.
    IX.         The effects of human voices on other animals—
                  even ones we think of as predators, even the mountain
                  lions which grow skittish, avoid the trails
                  if NPR is playing from speakers or a woman’s voice
                  in genteel tones recites a poem—is what ecologists call
                  the landscape of fear, which sounds like a metal band
                  that senior in algebra who pressured & flirted with me
                  to borrow my bracelet for just one day, then gave
                  it to his girlfriend, would have loved; like that nightfall
                  on an Oakland street three men crossed quick from
                  different corners, converging toward me—that run-down
                  store I ducked into & them through the window & me
                  pretending I needed Snickers or Ruffles or Ruffles or anything—
                  that old fear-song of why were you ever here? where
                  can you go now at night in America? That landscape
                  of gunshots we’d hear sometimes bedtimes, saying
                  maybe fireworks? near no known holiday.
                  Unclasped fear in our backs after each new headline
                  when we’d all guard our bodies, keep our distance from
                  the grids, move cautiously along a mental map of risk.
                  Those men’s still-there laughter, those men with bullets
                  at their backs too in this racist country. We learn to
                  detour. We human super predators, our softest voices
                  reading The Wind in the Willows, profoundly disturbing
                  the animals, so the raccoons stop eating, so fish
                  proliferate, then mussels, whole cascades.
Teague_Correlations_Format.pdf |