Selected Poetry by C.C. Apap

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when I ask my student how the poem makes her feel

and she says confused.

                                                                        amen.

I am a white cis-gendered heterosexual man in 2024

and my faith is not the faith of my birth. so I get it.

here’s the problem: either we neuter poetry

by reducing it to structure or theme, and it becomes

a barren thing with a shriveled husk for a heart

                                                                  or

we gut it of everything but a reflective surface.

poetry as instagram post. the mirror of our lives

crying me, me until someone shortens it

to meme and we usefully forget its origins.

so we are left here—the poem by jericho brown

turned upon a spit. I teach class after class

tenor and vehicle. ghazal, sonnet, and the blues

each line echoing the one before, the beginning

in the end, as always. and then I ask them

how it makes them feel. I wonder if I would feel

better if one of them said, quietly, in the back,

that it felt distinctly like me pressing on a bruise? 

forbidden fruits

clambering over fences at midnight,

trespassing, we pulled all the fruit down

in the orchards, paid for nothing except

with the guilt that stuck to our fingers

forever. my every memory of furtive

longing is tainted by the truth. I was

a child, loving children. we were all

young and foolish. we pilfered condoms

from parents or pharmacies. we stole

time together. all our pleasure purloined.

was it any wonder none of us, not one,

learned the meaning of consent?  no one

failed to be sick with the juice of the fruit,

dripping down our chins, sweet as sin.

C.C. Apap grew up in the kind of suburb of Detroit where functioning farms existed just over the back fence. He teaches literature at Oakland University. His poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in Belt Magazine, Alba, The Thimble Literary Magazine, Roi Fainéant, The Wild Umbrella, and The Hooghly Review.