On Being Asked What Question I Don’t Want to Answer by rebecca brown

Why did I select this poem? The speaker in “On Being Asked What Question I Don’t Want to Answer” dances with the darker themes of violence and despair with prowess, levity, and a wit that guards against the sentimental. It’s an engaging poem all the way through—a poem of urgency and invitation, a poem that rides with the mind’s associations. Cherry tomatoes, hotel sheets, god-terror, cicadas—the house of memory is summoned here in strange and non-linear ways. Constructed of fragmented answers to unknown questions—questions that by the title’s frame are undesired—the poem puts me off-kilter, and I like that. I’m carried along by the rhythms and repetitions—“I say yes desperately. I say chestnuts”—though the full story remains artfully obscured. As a reader, I feel, in this poem, the self coming alive into its own confusing existence—an awakening to the past as it lives in the present, and an attempt to reckon with the holiness and terror that live beneath the surface of things.
—Judge Brynn Saito on LAR Poetry Award winner “On Being Asked What Question I Don’t Want to Answer” by rebecca brown

I say for what. I say don’t
you have your own life to deliberate. I say Pravin
and 25. I think of the lilac
bush in the alley behind our house.
I say because she tried when I was drunk
and singing karaoke very badly. I say
cherry tomatoes. I think of the dust kicking
up from the white-washed gravel.
I say perspicacity. I say Jesus fuck.
I say when I lay in bed and was terrorized
by the idea of eternity. I say god. I say fish.
I think of the tree in the yard with the empty shells
of cicadas decamped for the next town
and its Dairy Queen. I say her
hand on my back. I say the first thing I knew
was I would hurt other people. I say The Bear.
I think of how I almost strangled myself with a sheet
at the Blueberry Hill Motel.
I say yes desperately. I say chestnuts.
I say chicken bone and Jeff Brubaker. I say the laminated
green tile floor of our bathroom. I think of singing Cherish in the car
with the world black around us and the green dashboard
holy as dragonflies. I say milk. I say sloe-eyed.

rebecca brown is a poet from Chicago, IL. She is a VONA/Voices of our Nations Arts alumna. rebecca has been a teaching artist and dialogue facilitator for 11 years. She is currently crafting her first chapbook collection.