Food Distribution Point Tour, Ifo

ISSUE: Winter 2012

Photo by Marcus Bleasdale

Over a tundra of red sand they arrive eager as stadium
fans, with laundry-like sacks and bags, separated into queues:
men and women awaiting the globe’s provisions.
I try not to look at their silt-soft eyes, but to parade through
makes us and them exotic as snow monkeys in Central
Park. The clichéd view begs the clichéd question:
Who is on display? The observer or the observed? A heckle
begins from a woman in the crowd, then grows to a mock rerun
of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; they ululate
and chant till their high-pitched tongue trills turn the warehouse
to a dark forest. Our stage fright is sudden; we hurry straight
to the shed and watch as the flour scooper shows
us how the frontline of hunger is shortened by a white
pour into the Heart of Darkness. They wait for the first
of the month like the poor in Detroit, a flea-bite solution
in the fight against famine. We’re stuck, our roles rehearsed.

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (Norton, 2023), The Absurd Man (Norton, 2020), Roll Deep (Norton, 2015), Holding Company (Norton, 2010), Hoops (Norton, 2006), and Leaving Saturn (Georgia UP, 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Orion, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.