Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

There used to be a time when movie celebrities were mythic figures. Their lives seemed airtight, sealed from the public. You only saw them on the big screen. Some were demigods; those you saw running from the paparazzi. They existed and moved about in a stratosphere such that we could only imagine their lives. Even then we were misled. We conflated their roles with a possibly fallible person off-the-screen.

Today, you see celebrities testing avocados in your local health food store, dispensing meditation advice on social media or trick or treating, like I once saw Alec Baldwin and his family — decked out as astronauts, or was it Ghostbuster outfits?

Today’s cleverly sonic poem collapses the distance even more between celebrities and us, by using a parasocial relationship as a jumping off point for a journey of the imagination.

An Apology for Trashing Magazines in Which You Appear
by Nicole Sealey

I was out of line, Brad Pitt.
You’re no Eliot Spitzer.
I’m no preacher. This apology no bully pulpit
where I sermonize our epitasis –
Woody Allen tragicomedy in which I play
         “Serendipity,”
and am blinded by you, a star, Jupiter

(third brightest in the night, spitting
image of the sky god). Patience might be for pipits
and “forever” a spit
of land neighboring Atlantis, but I’ll wait my turn.
         Pity
your first marriage ended. I didn’t mind her as much
         as that Jolie-Pitt
situation, complete with pitter-

patter of 12 Benetton-inspired feet. But, I’m not bitter.
         My pit
bull bears your name, and I call my man – with whom
         I’m going to Pittsburgh
for a wedding – out his name. Into yours: Brad Pitt.
Daydreams of you and me rivaled only by Brandon
         and me on Peach Pit
counters, from the original 90210. Even so, I’d wish he
         were you. Adonis epitome.
Abandon Hollywood for Bed-Stuy, skip down spit-

paved sidewalks to my brownstone. My poetry
         pittance, 
your movie money . . . I suspect we’d do fine with our
         combined capital.
We’d be the mixed-race Pitts
on Tompkins Park. I’d be hospitable,
hosting meet and greets so as not to appear uppity.
Casually introducing you, I’d say, “Oh, this is Brad.
         This is just Brad Pitt.”

You’d find macabre humor in my obsession with 
         Poe’s Pit
and the Pendulum and the palpitating
Tell-Tale Heart. The heart is an odd organ, a maudlin
         muscle, a cesspit
of undeserved affection. I admit I’ve had trouble
         pitting
good sense against non, but who hasn’t? (Did you
         know the per capita 
divorce rate is 50%? Pitiful.)
Like with Juliette and Jennifer, I pray Angelina was
         a pit
stop on your way to Brooklyn. When I first saw you,
         Brad Pitt,
I was 15 and became so ill I was rushed to the
         hospital. 
My hands, feet and armpits
began to sweat as If I were riding horseback up a hill
         toward a love who made the pit
of my stomach ache; literally, Legends of the Fall was
my pitfall.

Brad Pitt, I imagine a much older you – spitfire
and only slightly decrepit – staring my epitaph
down as if your gaze were the capital and my
         headstone a ghetto to be pitied.

“An Apology for Trashing Magazines in Which You Appear" by Nicole Sealey from ORDINARY BEAST © 2017 by Nicole Sealey. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.