Obituary
by Mitchell L. H. Douglas
The last barber I had
before the pandemic
killed like stray bullets
told me not to cut too close
on my own, “Leave
something between you
& the blade,” he said.
To Donald, the student,
find your way, said the book
I signed to him. I found it
on the shelf @ Half Price. Clearly,
he didn’t follow
his own advice.
Against
the blade is all bile, no
honey—no sweet talk out
of no way: mad buzz
& hunger’s wings. I am
told I can be anything, raised
by Alabama’s best forged north,
housed in the bowels of the city
that doesn’t love us back. Arms
& hands reached for me, taking the brunt
of what the steel & sharp
dished. All a part of the language,
the oath life labors.
In the early days of the pandemic—when alternating bouts of isolation and fear took hold—I thought a lot about necessity and vanity. Shopping for groceries to keep me fed while I looked for answers on the severity of the virus? Definitely a necessity. Haircuts in a barbershop full of unmasked folks? Certainly not.
To stay safe for myself and my family, I relied on haircuts at home. In that time of separation from barbers who became friends, I recalled the advice my barber gave me when he saw I had attempted my own shapeups before dropping in every other week.
And then I saw the poetry collection I signed for him at a second-hand bookstore.
It threw me deeper into the consideration of what is lost in the process of separation from the familiar and the uneasy feeling of a new and uncertain way of living. Hence a poem that starts in what seems like a simple act before encountering a sharp volta.
In my last book, dying in the scarecrow’s arms, I wrote a series of poems about finding books signed by the author in used bookstores. In “Obituary,” the tables turn and the signed book I find is my own. It’s a poem I wasn’t sure I would ever share, but it feels necessary now. And I am grateful for the opportunity to show just how strange those times were (and still are).
Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of dying in the scarecrow’s arms; \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award; and Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, an NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee. His “Poem that Begins w/a Tweet About Gwendolyn Brooks” was recently featured in This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets edited by Kwame Alexander. A 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Douglas is associate professor of English at Indiana University Indianapolis, a Cave Canem alum, and cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets. His visual art has been published in The Adroit Journal and The Offing and Callaloo.
