open and tongue it off your bones?
How soon afterwards did you fall off the bed
and begin writhing on the carpet? Did this man
stand over you watching your spasm?
How quickly did your swimming arms wrap
around his ankles? Remind you of an altar quaking
beneath the weight of all that fresh sin?
Did your arms wrapped around his ankles
make you feel maybe like a sexy wet dream
white boys tuck beneath their dicks?
Did your arms wrapped around his ankles
suddenly give the false idol a face and a neck
that laughed at your lust?
How quickly does this positioning betray?
How quickly do his ankles betray? His grin
betray? How black girl do you feel?
How quickly does your back
on the carpet scratch
or soften your peeling spine?
How soon does your flesh
de-bone itself, does your black
cough out its own teeth?
NAT TURNER GOES VACATIONING IN D.C.
The city is quiet and completely empty.
Nat Turner takes his shoes off,
walks down the middle of the road,
and follows the yellow double line to the heart of the city.
He presses his toes into the tar,
tries to feel the blood pulsing below the surface.
He follows the river downtown.
He follows the river to the MLK memorial,
applies his palms to the base.
The stone feels cold, memory-less
despite the carved quotes, blood-less
despite the protruding body.
He climbs to the top of the monument,
leans into the sunset and raises his ax above his head,
throws his shoulders down into the rock
and chips the corner of King’s hand.
He thinks it’s funny, that we took a rock
and tried to pull a body out of it,
called it honor, named it memory.
He leans again, ax above his head, shoulders—
and again, chips a bit of granite away.
Again and again until Nat hollows out a hole.
He squeezes the handle, kisses the metal,
drops the ax into the chiseled spot.
Hours later, the sun slowly rises.
An outline of a black man with an ax
spreads onto the grass.
Nat turns his back on the monument.
There is nothing in memory but a mouth-less shadow.
He follows the river of blood back down the road,
leaves the city-state full of stone
and carved quotes, empty of bodies and memory,
full of so many shadows and so many ghosts.
HOW AMERICA LOVES CHICAGO’S GHOSTS MORE THAN THE PEOPLE STILL LIVING IN THE CITY
an erasure of Chance The Rapper’s “Paranoia”
Eyes been on the gun,
on the dying,
the shit neighborhood.
They watch the paper,
watch the hood boy militia
trapped in the middle of the sun.
Lips with a lotta murder talk.
They probably scared of all the
dark dark down here. Our nation,
dry eyes, paranoia and a lotta dying,
been pouring fireworks in the summer.
I hear everybody’s god
a little scared too.
QUESTIONS FOR THE WOMAN I WAS LAST NIGHT, 3
after Kush Thompson, after Warsan Shire
How are you still unable to make
your pelvis a bible? How do you become
a glutton for pain and still blame
the dinner plate for being full?
How do you substitute addiction
for addiction for giving up
your history in shame’s mouth?
How is your mouth a city lost
beneath the sea and really just
a wet grave at the same time?
Is your mouth really just a mass
burial for the burning sheets?
Will the burning sheets
become your body’s swaddling
clothes, damp with moving flesh?
Will you arise come morning?
Do your hands push through
the fabric like stretched skin?
Do you fight it? Do you ever
fight or does the smoke calm you?
When you wake up smelling
like a burnt house, melted plastic
and appliances, do you
tell yourself you will rebuild?
CONJURING: A LESSON IN WORDS AND GHOSTS
Our desks are in a circle in our classroom & it just so happens I’m sitting next to my white professor & all my black girl hair is flung over one shoulder & I can see everyone’s face & my professor, we’re talking about the 1920s & my professor, he says nigger & before that we were talking about Ralph Ellison & before that we were talking about Claude McKay & we skipped over Nella Larson & made fun of Gwendolyn a bit, but c’est la vie & my professor, he runs right through nigger like it’s not a wall my whole history is pinned up against & nigger sits in the middle of all of our desks & it’s like I’m the only one who can see it & everyone else in the room turns white even though they’re not; they’re pink & pale & sandy & tree-colored but still, everyone I mean everything turns white & I’m just a dot & I’m just a black girl with black girl hair & my black girl hips balanced in this dark red chair & we all know nigger is tree-colored & I can’t remember my face & my tongue bleeds right into my teeth & my mouth is full of spit & he didn’t mean it that way & this is academia & here comes the whole train of them, right? & don’t tell me I can’t say that word but you can & be mature / professional / quiet / good & freedom of speech & here they come & here’s the list of their freedoms they fight for but what about mine & I’m being honest, he really didn’t mean it that way & it’s just a word & my tongue & my teeth & language is such a complicated series of ropes and ladders & black folk be climbing and hanging at the same time & he only read it in context & it’s in the context of the reading & it’s in the reading & we all know nigger is tree-colored, which is to say, we all know nigger has black people hanging off the g’s, which is to say, some words carry ghosts no matter what because context & context is everything & my professor is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & just like that, the whole room is haunted.
HOW THE ATLANTIC OCEAN PREPARES FOR WAR
The Atlantic is a map of bones.
The Atlantic is a mouth of ancient boulders.
The Atlantic is holding massacre
like a keepsake against its heart.
The Atlantic is painting the sunset in blood
just above its receding hairline.
The Atlantic is stuffing its pockets
with photographs of children.
The Atlantic is drunk on Motown.
The Atlantic is drunk on jazz so black
its blue because
after things are black for a long time
they become blue.
The Atlantic has my jaw in its fist because my teeth
and tongue have curled into knuckles.
The Atlantic has Africa in its fist
because they’ve been trading ghosts for centuries.
The Atlantic has Haiti in its fist
because the slaves had so much fight
it filled up the moon;
the moon moves everything.
The Atlantic has fists where
its knees should be.
The Atlantic has fists where
its shoulders curl into arms.
The Atlantic has fists where
its waist is supposed to bend.
The Atlantic punches
everything,
has fists where its eye sockets
punch back at the gaping holes in the moon,
collide, caress, call each other family.
THE SPLIT ROCK PRAYS TO WHATEVER BROKE IT
Rage is not to be avoided, diminished, belittled. Rage is God. Better believe my rage is seeped in love. – Shira Erlichman
Let my anger be warm and ripe with love.
Let it reek of car crashes that we have all survived.
Let it breathe. Let it dance in my fists.
Let it collapse drunk and merry
across my knees, my bedspread.
Let my anger be a thick, bubbling bath
and the cool towel by the windowsill.
Let my anger stretch into a generous wingspan.
Let it be a split rock, a steady hammer,
a plank of wood that still remembers the whole tree.
Let it sweeten the milk, turn the mug steaming
hot against the freezing chatter in my teeth.
Let it be thick thick as a St. Louis summer.
Let it be thick and just as full of memory
and just as full of arched backs stretching the tired
out of their spines, and just as full of black,
and just as full of blues.
Let my anger be the city of St. Louis, fresh-faced,
looking in the mirror at all its pimples and stretch marks,
looking at all its hard beauty that belongs to itself only,
calling up Detroit, calling up Philly and all those cities saying,
Baby, let’s all go dancing. Let’s roll our windows down and sing.
Bring all your busted windows and overgrown lawns
and new coffee shops we can’t afford and the schools
closing or not and the naked empty lots and cellulite sidewalks
and bring all your dead musicians and we’ll make a night of it.
Let my anger be the celebration we were never
supposed to have because we were never
supposed to know we had anything
worth celebrating.
QUENTIN TARANTINO or WHY I DO NOT TRUST YOU WITH MY HISTORY or ON WEARING A GAUDY ROBE WHILE GRABBING THE ASS OF A NAKED BLACK WOMAN FOR A MAGAZINE
I picture you mostly
as an arrangement of limbs.
You are the tenderest butcher.
All of you is eyes upand-
down-ing my frame.
All of you is hands, knuckles
pounding out a drumbeat.
All of you is mining my throat
for gold with your fingers.
All of you fingerprints, birthmarks.
All of you is fingers like stretch marks.
Mama said keep your hands to yourself
All of you dancing on broken back.
All of you the biggest hands,
say you just want to touch me.
Mama said keep your hands
All of you is eyelids and eyes.
All of you is mouth
kissing your nameplate
in the nestled home between my breasts,
licking the tree branch of my collarbone,
tripping over the notches of each noose,
drooling down the river of my spine.
You are the tenderest butcher.
Just want to squeeze me.
Just want to touch it
Mama said
All of you is spit
Mama said
All of you tongue snake
all the way around my throat.
All of you thin pink wire lips,
All of you such big hands
touching everything,
Mama said keep your hands
All of you
butcher
stench
think you own
everything, think
you own my
everything.
All of you
grin
laugh
lean back
cock your head
suck your teeth
toothpick my black
pinky-finger-pick
me out your
mouth like a snapped neck bone
be careful cuz
Mama said
I can still choke you
All of you
such big mouth,
so many teeth.
I always picture you
bloated, freshly-feasted,
your dinner plate,
a gravestone,
bones picked clean.
THINGS I SHOULD SAY TO MYSELF IN THE MIRROR or THINGS I WOULD SAY TO THE CITY OF ST.LOUIS IF IT COULD HEAR ME
I’ve been planning
to leave you for years.
It began as a quiet urging
in the bottom of my heels
and now I dream
only of highways.
My desk drawer
opens to the smell
of engine exhaust
and the letter I wrote
when I was nineteen
and made my wrists
a cave of plane tickets.
It is a sign of prudent planning
to have marked an escape route
through your own bones.
Once, after all the policemen
left your forearm,
I walked my eyes along
the scar tissue on Delmar,
pretending, casually,
that I was your lover.
I did it nearly every day
for a whole summer
until I couldn’t help
but smell entirely of skin.
Don’t be so hard
on yourself. Half of you
is postcard, while the other
half of you is trying
to rebuild what, years ago,
was burned to the ground
by someone else. You are
always rebuilding. You are
always reaching for the river.
You have survived so much
that no one remembers.
And you still spread warm
rain on all your overgrown
lots. And you still get dressed
in the morning. You still
open wide for the sun.
NAT TURNER FINDS OUT I’M CONSIDERING NOT GOING BACK TO SCHOOL TO FINISH MY UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE
I’m at a table by the wall,
hugging a small coffee with both hands.
Nat walks into the nutmeg-filled shop,
lays a wrinkled hand on my shoulder.
I stand, breathless; we exit the diner together.
Outside on the sidewalk, under the grey sky,
I lean into his heavy shadow.
I am drunk on the gravity of his bones.
He holds my hand as we walk and instantly I am
eleven years old. I want nothing more than to
hear him speak. His lips, a mountain-range above
his chin. We walk this way: two matches, one lit,
down the street until we arrive at a cemetery.
We walk to the center of the gated field. He presses his
hand against my cheek. I feel no heartbeat
but his skin is buzzing. The sky rolls into dusk.
He slaps me. Hard. Surrounded in tombstones.
Says first, “Some of us ain’t even got no rock.”
My whole face is hot. He presses his hand against my
cheek. I smell blood. I begin to cry. I’m so sorry.
He touches my shoulder. He kisses my forehead.
He drags his thumb under each eye, brushes away the water
& the salt. The humid air leaves sweat above his eyebrows.
I continue to cry. From my lip, I taste that I am leaking blood.
Says second, “Our people know these two things best:
water and salt. We cry when we run out of sweat,
we sweat when we tired of cry.”
Nat, sweating. Me, cheek burning, still crying.
Both of us, surrounded by rocks and ghosts.
For an hour we stay gathered here, buried in fog.
I stop crying. We make eye contact for the first time.
Says last, “Good. You tired of cry. Now go back to school,
and sweat.”
BIPOLAR IS BORED AND RENAMES ITSELF
I have recently come to the realization
that I will be writing “the bipolar disorder poem”
for the rest of my life.
There are hundreds of ways
to say I am wrapped in my own bees’ nest.
or My body is a haunted
house that I am lost in.
There are no doors but there are knives
and a hundred windows.
or My body has apologized
When the Ghosts Come Ashore Page 2
