Like writing history with lightning— all sharp corners and dead-blind. Jungleland bleaches its teeth for its first high-house silver screening. President Woodrow Wilson smiles, recognizes the oak trees mistaken for Southern reserve. A litmus test for a better view, a cleaner plot, a place to call one’s own. Only. Under President Wilson, a photo- graph became required for all new federal job applicants. The Navy, the Treasury, but most importantly, the Post Master General where, shortly after election, ghosts began floating behind screens. An elegant solution: the details of a look for a tidier exchange, a salve for the face-to-face and the averted eye. Your finest term accomplishment: a population of alternatives working hard under- ground. The Dead Letter Office is to the left, down the hall. Blank forms tucked away from public view, an envelope carrying the rust of bright machinery away from the tongue. Not dead, no trace. No one here by that name. An easy opacity for the splice. The imagination is most active when the body is scared. I grasp another letter, find your face on the highest denomination of our currency. Sort to Destroy, I stamp it, but outside the reporters are already getting it all wrong.
The first film screening at the White House was "Birth of a Nation," a blatantly racist film that was used as a recruitment tool for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. A leaf does not fall from thin air. While we can never revise our collective histories, my most optimistic hope is for insistent, relentless attention to our nation’s darkest corners.
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"Writing Devi’s poems into English—I guess I mostly believe that Benjamin was right: even the original poem is a ‘translation’ of an experience past language—made me a writer of poems nothing like the poems I myself wrote. They were poems of great despair, of great rage, emotions ordinarily thought of perhaps as ‘negative;’ certainly they were emotions and feelings that I myself was only just beginning to explore in my own work."
