White Noise

And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion:
because they think they are white.

—James Baldwin

Whiteness is a mind. A kind of eye.
It severs and scans, breeding ghosts, re-
moving what it can’t be. It hates not being
everything. At night, it lies there (I lie
there), glitching, running scripts, trying to see
all things inside itself. As if the eye might see
the eye seeing and know its pure rightness—
as if being right means I don’t have to die.

Certainty as a drug. A need. A theory
describes the last ice age whitening
my ancestors’ skin. Stuck too far north,
they sat listening into the endless night
reading threats in everything. Suspicion
sentenced the mind. The genome. Maybe.
Maybe policing from a cave’s mouth
fits as a beginning. As a myth.

But whiteness invents itself in history.
It builds a ship. A badge and a map.
It is a cop metastasized into a holiday.
Into a credit line. Into a child. White,
I lie awake for hours, letting the TV’s light
write its stories into me. And I know
it’s too easy to think one isn’t a person—
to turn all things to nothing, dreaming

a crack in the ceiling’s corner, there,
where a little white god crawls in, selling
death in fiction. In abstraction. In three
white time release capsules. Or
a past. A policy. A polite, well-fenced
residential area, somewhere in Ohio,
in a room with a suicide by overdose.
For whiteness, death is another face

of certainty. A secret face. The one
its law drapes across the stilled bodies
it targets in the dark. Whiteness thinks,
“If I’m not right, I’m not alive.” And so—
one haunts the threads. One plots and trolls.
And somewhere, one crawls from bed,
turns up the machine, and just lies there,
listening, as the room goes white.

R.M. Haines is a writer from southwestern Ohio. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Glass,
Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review,
West Branch, and elsewhere. More information can be found at rmhaines.com.