There Are Some Things That Are Only Said in Looking

February 26, 2026

by Keith S. Wilson, poetry faculty

Where I live in Chicago, any restaurant that feels a little fancy will open their front door and go all out on those wrought-iron deck chairs. Maybe the tables, with their round bases that don’t quite sit flush, will match the chairs, which are the filigreed kind with metalwork that exists within the delicate space between lacework and hand-rolled Play-Doh. And finally they’ll line up those metal fence-stands that the city loves and convert two-thirds of the sidewalk into another place to eat, out in the plein air. At night, and in the winter, they’ll chain it all together, but for as long as the business remains a business, the whole affair will exert its big masculine energy, man-spreading into the city and forcing those who can walk to walk through the mulch of gingko trees or to get very close to one another in order pass through a corridor of nothing.

This was the case as I tried, in the cold, to squeeze past two ambling teenage boys. I got too close. The boy nearest to me called me a homophobic slur, and said he would kick my ass. Maybe, together, the two of them could do it. Had they wanted that. I put my hand out as one does with a car that starts to move. Who knows what they really wanted. But I think I know how they felt.

•

I know a bird’s relationship with glass.

The blood latched up in the throat. I shave

without looking. What else is brown and soft

as that? I spot apples, brown-yellow

brown-black. I’m thirteen. Colored the color

of wet sand.

This is a quote from “Brown (Sonnet)”¹, first published in Adroit as “How a Brown Sonnet.” It appears too in my recent book of visual poetry, Games for Children, where I spent some time really trying to look at myself. By really, I mean truly, but I also mean actually. I tried to actually look at my face, and my body. And now that I am not thirteen, when I do this, I can consider the narrow paths that do not involve thinking, at all, of violence.

•

In America, many men, maybe most, are raised under a negative awareness of the bodies of men. Which, to a man, is his own body. Or anyway, that’s what it seems. I think sometimes that the ugliest language is imposed silence, and this is that—a subject nobody I was raised around would ever have talked about.

The thing about looking is that it exists in the place between saying nothing (what poetry is said to do) and direct action. “Brown (Sonnet)” takes this up in its form as a flow chart, instructing, the way body language can, toward what you ought to do next. It works in some sense the way the men I have known (and been) work through their love: sometimes with words, sometimes with a gesture, always laboring around the point.

•

In my first book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, I have an ode to the male form called “The Floor Scrapers.” It is an ekphrastic piece based on Gustave Caillebotte’s famous painting by the same name.

when i am freest, when i’m at peace, it is only the light

making palatable my hands, in a grasp,

in a reach like this, as when a man offers his

in extension and becomes, before me,

a basilica, and i watch the gleam of the fish-throated

muscles of the back, the narrow bones

and knees and, i say again, the knuckles,

each a chamber for a whole religion

performed by the hands

I am fortunate that every time a man has threatened me, it has been for show. It has turned out fine. But you never know. Last year I saw a man twice my age beaten slick to the floor of the bus for walking too close to another man who would not move from the entrance. He had let me pass. Who knows what I did or didn’t do.

“The Floor Scrapers” painting arrests me every time in part because I imagine all those hours rendering men. Watching, and painting, and expressing their forms as burnished, as touched smooth. They are hard and beautiful and made the same as the varnished wood, the raw wood, between them. There are some things that are only said in looking, though the painting is also a kind of sport, since like sports it’s always an excuse to wonder at the bodies of men.

•

Even now, I’m hardly better at speaking about any of this than I was as a child, raised not just by my father, but by looks in the street.  But what I know is that for men, there is hardly an act more dangerous than looking too long at an unfamiliar man on the train except doing it kindly. I think it’s less dangerous to threaten a man than to love him. I think this is, in part, because looking is not only that thing which exists between inaction and action, but is a language unto itself. All of us know what it is like to look meaningfully, and what it means to look away.

¹ One of the inspirations for “Brown (Sonnet)” is the work of Terrance Hayes, whose sonnets (“We sliced the watermelon into smiles” and “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin”) reckon with the sonnet (the West itself) as a white form. And with the sonnet as a Black form. And as a Black form surrounded by a white form. Put simply, what is the standard for beauty? What if I do not fit it? What happens if I do? My sonnet is a flow chart, because self-hate is a set of directions handed to us. A sonnet is that too.

---

Keith S. Wilson is author of the poetry collections Games for Children (Milkweed Editions) and Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon). He is an Affrilachian Poet, Cave Canem fellow, and graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. He has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. He serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Four Way Review and Digital Media Editor at Obsidian Journal. His work in interactive fiction includes A Day in the Life, a narrative decision-making game, and Black Box, an educational roleplaying game. His writing has appeared in Poetry, Adroit Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Little A, Narrative, 32 Poems, Rhino, Muzzle, Blueshift Journal, and Vinyl. He has received an NEA Grant, a Best of the Net Award, and a Redivider Blurred Genre prize, and his work has been anthologized in Best New Poets. He holds an MFA from Chicago State University.