“Colosseum” by Jericho Brown:
I don’t remember how I hurt myself,
The pain mine
Long enough for me
To lose the wound that invented it
As none of us knows the beauty
Of our own eyes
Until a man tells us they are
Why God made brown. Then
That same man says he lives to touch
The smoothest parts, suggesting our
Surface area can be understood
By degrees of satin. Him I will
Follow until I am as rough outside
As I am within. I cannot locate the origin
Of slaughter, but I know
How my own feels, that I live with it
And sometimes use it
To get the living done,
Because I am what gladiators call
A man in love—love
Being any reminder we survived.
Previous poems from Brown here and here.
(From The New Testament © 2014 by Jericho Brown. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Detail of the Gladiator Mosaic, 4th century CE, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
