Let It Be Broke

By Ed Pavlic

The poems in Ed Pavlić’s Let It Be Broke are ignited by sonic memories—from Chaka Khan on the radio to his teenaged daughter singing “Stay” at a local café—that spark a journey into personal and ontological questions. Pavlić’s lyric lines are equal parts introspection and inter-spection, a term he coins for the shared rumination that encourages some collective deep thinking about the arbitrary boundaries that perpetuate racial and geographic segregation and the power of words to transcend those differences. In an epiphanic moment, Pavlić recalls a quote shared by a former teacher as “a hammer made of written words,” and how he held “onto those words / as if they were steel bars and I was dangling over some bright black deepness.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Release date: Mar 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781945588624

Book preview

Sobriety

2016 Summer Equinox (Police State) Revision: John Donne

And the American word

brother   resound ::

(father   son   uncle   nephew)

out (the)

law

Any black man’s death diminishes me

I. A What Film

I have a need to make specific references.

—Kathleen Collins, Losing Ground, 1982

All Along It Was a Fever

i

A what poem. So I’m what?

Eight? It’s 1974. I’m going to bed, scared,

in my bright orange, Jimmy Walker

J.J. Dy-no-mite T-shirt. Listening to the radio,

scared of what, I don’t know—

my knee a dim-toned teepee under the white

sheet, Michael moving mountains,

Marvin dance with me, said, pretty baby,

or, later, Chaka Khan

you act so undercover; so under the covers

my summer body spilled thin

as the distance backward into a voice,

which is a distance spilled forward

and, no matter the mop, seeped through

the cracks in the historical planks.

Timpani. Ms. Khan sings Clouds,

. . . in the distance, coming to change my plans.

2015. Are you Black? I wouldn’t say that. Sometimes the world says that.

ii

2010. I’m what gets off a dhow

with Fazul Muhammad’s utterly peaceful

brother-in-law, and Binyavanga, at the lip

of a sandy, deserted island,

a stand of pines on a parenthetical dune

swept up out of a cirrus