Imagining the battering emotions felt by families whose loved ones’ lives were extinguished by police, “The Whole Thing” begins by anthropomorphizing language—the plea as a brutalized body. Shot or stabbed, the holes cannot respire, cannot save life, but in dying, fuels a fury and sorrow which is all-consuming and seeks repeated annihilation of all things. The final metaphor, “God’s plantation,” is provocative and polemical. Through the filters of rage, pain, and sorrow, the protagonist feels that faith, theist religion, and the physical and social orders of “God’s creation(s)”—at least for that moment—is bondage. I believe that the queer aesthetic project—like any queer mode—antagonizes the normative, our baseline assumptions or views about the world, if not problematizes them for transformative ends.
“The Whole Thing” is literally a queer form. The curious application of the em dash between words or phrases is borrowed from Emily Dickinson but deployed as a specific tactic: to disrupt a seamless reading and force pauses in recognition that the silence and the breath—both things simultaneously imposed and not granted to George Floyd, Eric Garner, Christian Hall, and other victims of police violence—are part of the poem.
“The Whole Thing” envisions personal and social fury having the power to upend the divine, a power that can destroy to remake the world as well—as though we have a choice.
Pleas—to Ma(ma)—hands up—or—knee-crushed—some with—exit wounds—some with—puncture wounds—which can’t—yank—breaths—yet—death-gasps—revive—grief’s embers—and tears—(rage’s accelerant)—incinerate—the whole thing—(God’s plantation)—over—and over—as though—free.