When the Neighbors Fight
by Terrance Hayes

The trumpet's mouth is apology.
We sit listening

To Kind of Blue. Miles Davis
Beat his wife. It hurts

To know the music is better
Than him. The wall

Is damaged skin. Tears can purify
The heart. Even the soft

Kiss can bite. Miles Davis beat
His wife. It's muffled

In the jazz, the struggle
With good & bad. The wall

Is damaged skin. The horn knows
A serious fear.

Your tongue burns pushing
Into my ear. Miles Davis

Beat his wife. No one called
The cops until the music

Stopped. The heart is a muted
Horn. The horn is a bleeding

Wife. Tonight our neighbors are a score
Of danger. You open

My shirt like a door you want
To enter. I am tender

As regret. Mouth on the nipple
Above my heart.

There is the good pain
Of your bite.

From Muscular Music by Terrance Hayes (Tia Chucha Press, 1999)Copyright © Terrance Hayes. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author

Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971. He received a B.A. from Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina, and an M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh writing program. He is the author of Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (2002), which won National Poetry Series, and Muscular Music (1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has been a recipient of many honors and awards, including a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Best American Poetry selection, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family.

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