From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject Here nor There
Date November 23, 2019 1:00 AM
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[ The poet Clint Smith, born and raised in New Orleans, writes
from a wistful perspective of the city “kept from becoming.” ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HERE NOR THERE   [[link removed]]

 

Clint Smith
July 1, 2019
Adroit Journal
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_ The poet Clint Smith, born and raised in New Orleans, writes from a
wistful perspective of the city “kept from becoming.” _

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Here nor There

By Clint Smith

New Orleans is a bouquet of pixilated memories.
A caravan of embers that refuse to turn to ash.
I have tried to write these poems before, you know,
the ones about the infamous storm & its majestic

violence. The flood water that swallowed a city
& then sat still as night. I think often of the things
it took from us that we’ll never know we could
have had. Counterfactuals have always been a bed

of thorns in a room with nowhere else to lay your
head. To imagine what could have been but never
was. The Christmases with my children in the home
where I once opened presents. Kicking a soccer ball

with my daughter against the same playground wall
where I imagined a life of goals & glory. That home
is now silent as a sky of smoke. That wall is no longer
a wall but a smattering of bricks in a lonely field.

I tremble at what I already know is likely, that my
children will not know this city beyond the holidays
& funerals that bring them here. That I no longer
know the city I have always worn like a tattoo.

Nostalgia is a well-intentioned wound. I still remember
the city as something it was kept from becoming.
I am still looking for a language not covered in ash.
I am still mourning the loss of a life that never was.

CLINT SMITH is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and has
received fellowships fromCave Canem, the Art for Justice Fund, the
Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the National Science
Foundation. He is a National Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of
the 2017 Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the _American Poetry Review_.
His writing has been published in _The New
Yorker_, _The Atlantic_, _The Paris Review_, _The New Republic_,
and other publications. He is the author of_ Counting
Descent_ (2016), which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry
Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was
a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His debut nonfiction book, _How
the Word Is Passed,_ is forthcoming from Little Brown. He was born
and raised in New Orleans.

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