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Indeterminacy

Charif Shanahan

The cog in the eye turns
Until there is nothing left
To discern. I sip tea

Steeped in a kind of lust—

If I say I am, you are, he/she/it is . . .
We don’t have to agree
But it requires, to mean,

A common rubric.

The clock reads the time
Because we set it. I mean,
How else? Who is anyone

Who is anyone?

The grass edges outline the grave:
Get to living!

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award.

About Charif Shanahan

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About this Poem

“This sonnet questions the integrity of the ‘categories’ of identity in which we live and which render some of us illegible to others, sometimes even to ourselves. By meditating on the constructedness of these categories, the speaker arrives at a new understanding of the desire for legibility: even when the circumstances are such that that desire cannot consistently be met, one possesses the agency to choose; to live, without reaching for a determinacy that their being resists, and to do so now, where life happens.”
—Charif Shanahan

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More by this poet

Thirty-Seventh Year

At the start of this narrative, I will pretend
Not to be alive, not to be

Speaking to you from the living earth.
To help you. I will pretend

The circumstances of our being
Here, together, are casual—

And not incidental
Of this awkward dilemma: How to co-exist

When you would like me dead.
For simplicity. For lack of threat.

In this narrative I will look
At you from a distance, as into the future,

No more real than I am,
Sitting here in my off-white body which I can feel

Charif Shanahan

2023

While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me

Specks of toothpaste fleck the mirror.

A fan spins dust in the hall.

I find this is it impossible to accept

So I wait for a new starting point

As though life will begin there and then.

Do you know what I mean?

Not what I’m saying, what I mean.

Is it possible my function is to hold

All the intricate, interstitial pain

And articulate clarity?

Tie a boat to my wrist, I sprout wings.

Give me a pair of shoes, I grow fins.

Once an hour I trick myself into focus:

Charif Shanahan

2023

Trace Evidence

When I say But mother, Black or not Black,
Of course we are polyethnic, your look does not change
Though it does harden, a drying clay bust
Abandoned or deliberately incomplete,
All the features carved in
Except the eyes. What I’m trying –
I mean – You are an Arab, yes,
By culture, by language, and in part by blood; by blood
You are also Black African – and when, then, I say
And probably a fair amount of European, too – the lights,
Though we’re standing at the corner of 195th and Jerome,

Charif Shanahan

2023

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Indeterminacy

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