Marlin M. Jenkins


Anti-poetica Featuring Video Game and Police Murder


I don’t want a single one of you to think that an unfair reality you’ve been forced into
is the only one that you have to live. —Dr. Takuto Maruki, Persona 5 Royal

It must have been at least a full week
since I’d seen the sun, noticed

the sky. Even the pizza delivery
man arriving at midnight

I cannot look in the face. It was
true what the study taught me:

a cookie alone in a container
tastes better than one from

a container full, but also the sky
was too much, swallowed me

into its vastness and spat me out
back onto my couch. I have been

both the one sitting next
to someone I love in a hospital,

their unkind mind strangling
their speech, and the one

whose depression thieves
my memories, chains me

to the dirty bed. Under that same
sky now bright with early

summer, around the corner from
the bookstore, 15 minutes from

my home, an officer held his knee
into a man’s neck until

he died—he couldn’t breathe
and then he would never breathe

again. Three officers and the sun
watched. My anxiety kept me

from the protests where the riot-
geared police flung teargas

canisters while protestors held
their hands up but even at home

I knew I was not safe; at the protest
I did attend my joints couldn’t handle

the weight of kneeling. We cannot
build the breath back into George

’s lungs but what reality can be created
in place of the razed buildings? To live

a life of one’s own choosing,
what one has built themselves,

is surely beautiful but my hands
are too tired to make, and besides

I have fewer and fewer materials
with which to build. How many more

of us will they watch taken on camera
before our lungs can breathe sky, not

burn with tear gas and smoke? How much
more art can catalog our grief? I am tired

of our beautiful suffering. I know
it is not sin to ask for one’s cup

to be taken, and this world has
already taken so much: I open

the cookie container and find
not what I hoped for, the cookies

taken to make me savor the last one
but then even the last one had been

stolen. Even the life I have chosen
is not a life I have chosen. I want to look

at the sky and see only sky, not
an empty openness I can’t reach.

Truth is, if removing the pain that led
to the poems means I lose

the poems, then burn every
page, wipe the whole damn hard drive.

Also by Marlin M. Jenkins: "Pixels"

Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. The author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and a graduate of University of Michigan's MFA program, their poems, stories, and essays have found lots of good homes online and in print. When they’re not writing or mentoring young people, they’re playing video games and watching cartoons. They currently live and teach in Minnesota.

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