Sandra Beasley

ROOSEVELT, MIDNIGHT


The story is paced out term by term. The Depression is a crash of water; terraced flow narrates the TVA dam. Carnelian granite erupts to blocks, naked in their etched enjambments: I hate / war. A man leans toward his radio. The breadline waits in bronze. Eleanor stands in her resolute suit to address the United Nations. Everywhere, his words. Missing: her words. Missing: Lucy Mercer. Missing: FDR’s cigarette, clenched at a rakish angle. For his version of the story, head to 9th and Pennsylvania. Look for a block the size of a desk, with In Memory of and the years of his birth and death. A story is an amusement park. The story is a cannon waiting to be aimed. The memorial opened and, four years later, they added a wheelchair. This stone is beautiful when snow falls. This stone is beautiful when the cherry blossoms accumulate, windswept. The sculpted wall is supposed to speak of WPA, CCC, our alphabet agencies. But its Braille dots are oversized beyond any one fingertip. This is gibberish, she says, feeling the spaces between.


SANDRA BEASLEY is the author of three poetry collections—Count the WavesI Was the Jukebox, and Theories of Falling—and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir that doubles as a cultural history of food allergies. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, and three DC Commission on the Arts and Humanties fellowships. She lives in Washington, DC, and teaches in the University of Tampa low-residency MFA program.


Issue Six
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