I don’t know how to tell you about
the rain. It falls as if all these woods
weren’t owned. It bends the arcs
of meteorites and flies, invites
uninhibited fucking on blankets of fir
needles. That night in Harlem we didn’t
kiss: this lifetime of lovely almost-but-
never pain is the rain’s. I want it to riot
at my small end, loose in the flowers
that’ll roof my grave. If we stop
with all these buildings and laptops
and flashing LEDs—all our
ceaseless wanting—this rain will
grow us a world new, naked and wild.
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Excerpted from Lives by CJ Evans, published by Sarabande Books.
CJ Evans
CJ Evans is the author of A Penance (New Issues Press) and The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets chapbook series. He received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and currently lives in California, where he is the editorial director of Two Lines Press, a publisher of international literature in translation.
