Get it right, Jesus. Get you a gun.
This is your chance at vigilante.
Bring this shit home and fucking ante
up your omnipresence. Because
in the beginning, there was
it good?
It’s not. Where is your free-
for-all? What of that jealousy?
This is your chance to be a man
who keeps the shells because he can;
and, when he shoots, he always cocks
his head up toward his shadow box
shiny with carbon-copied gods
and gutted animals.Thy rod’s
useless.The good wordcannot make
morning beget another take
on mourning.
Say you’ve been abused,
white man’s burden, and can’t get used
to it.
No need to shake. You’re stable.
Your hands wash clean in the water table.
Or,bless us, Lord, to these
electrons, nuclei, our bonds
between the charge that corresponds
to charges.
Dear Lord, please
bless all the girth of black
Mandingo-looking Hercules,
cracked-out preemies, the ashy knees,
negroes yakety-yak
articulate.
Bless this
matter. Black life, apparently,
now matters. Saw the effigy
on FB.
Matter: criss-
cross bandage on a wound.
Matter: of substance.
First dead man
I saw? My grandfather deadpan
in his casket, more pruned
than ever, face shaved clean.
My mother said he used to call
all white men Mr. Charlie. All
’nem, she says. She says he’d lean
and never sweep the rooms
he and my grandma cleaned at night
at Michigan State where all the white
chalk was a blizzard’s blooms
in Mom’s eyes. He would say,
Mr. Charlie ain’t shit. Now Grandma can’t
remember it.
Matter: a slant.
Say of the matter, Say
it ain’t so.Matter: state.
When Baltimore blew up in May
after the police killed Freddie Gray,
my brother got irate
at News 13: It’s one
damn neighborhood. Whole town’s not up
in smoke. I told him, Frank,get up,
grab your TV and gun
it down your block and see
what happens.
Matter: consequence:
if then after before and hence:
matter of fact: you, me.
For that matter, were we
pretty back when we first begun
in God’s image? When is it done?
How sweet the sound of free.
The dark matter accounts
for all the space in space.
I saw
a dead man in the moon, the maw
of a hagfish, an ounce
of lymph.
Matter: no matter
but for breath, its water in the air
fogging my glasses when, in prayer
this morning, the grackles’ chatter
distracts me, and it’s how
perfect an omen: a blackbird, ants
on its body so it has a chance
to survive, at least, for now.
My spirit animal, at least, for now.
The gospel says that flesh gives birth
to flesh and it gives birth to spirit.
So many pregnancies though it
can’t possibly efface to a state
more open.
What the dove it was
once had were sacs and hollow bones
for air.
Somewhere, there are black ghost
knife fish bearing a charging current,
and flukes, no body cavity.
If you have no body, can you
be filled? They egest waste without
a taste of what it’s like to pace
the tannic mouthfeel of a moan.
I dream fishermen
offer chum, instead of loaves,
to catch my hunger.
I eat my body.
I barely even dry heave.
___ _______ ___ berry, the sweeter ___ _____.
What’s sweeter than a paramour who’s kept
and loving it: the way we say a man
keeps a mistress instead of has a mistress
because keep means possession, hold, and grip?
Bad bitch.
She loves that he left in a serein
tonight—fine rain and not a single cloud—
that the lightbulb in the lamp beside
her bed is dying, that it buzzes as
an insect does, the flashing filament
the thorax, shell the exoskeleton.
She loves the dog that’s hollering outside,
how it could be where he stood earlier,
next to a bird that must’ve hit the ground
like a bare back door—such aimless force, its head
sits perpendicular to its broad chest.
The dog must have its hungry face in it.
She loves thinking what it’d be like to bark
and grumble in your throat, to make a sound
of such alarm for both pleasure and pain
that people stand back. She hopes to make a noise
next time he comes over, an afternoon
on a day that’s warm enough for open windows,
when somebody will hear her, stop, and think
a mother tongue of glossolalia.
The devil got up in me something fierce.
See, I have a thing for dead white guys.
Right now, Robert Herrick.
Love me
Hesperides, the ending’s guise
of a start—
goddess Electra’s come-
to-tears moment birthing a sea
of flowers.
I can die the death
of poets. Caesura in my breath
on someone’s uvula. Esprit
vibrations. Resonator.
I used
to say fecund like begun, refused
correction.
Then somebody told
me my body’s not mine to hold.
To hold—grasp, carry, or support,
detain, incarcerate, intern,
impound; the what after the court;
archaic: Girl, you got to learn
your place. Adhere; maintain.
Let’s ball,
white boy. Next time I get exotic, I’ll call
you Hoss. Third person. You’re beside yourself.
Instead of You can get it, Hoss can get it.
When Hoss is getting it, he describes, at length,
the horny femur of a rooster’s leg
good for cockfights because, of course, Hoss knows
about roosters and cockfights.
When Hoss asks
if it’s racist to call him Hoss, No sir.
Got white-guy friends. Fuckloads of Allman Brothers.
Me: You’re a hassa, asking me that. And Hoss:
Hassa?
Then me: Hassa: as in Pacino
as in “pig” as in a crooked cop as in
Scarface. Hoss hasn’t seen Scarface.
Perfect.
Shadows from opened blinds cross Hoss’s neck.
Some kind of Jesus, though I’m never saved.
I put my makeup on and make
my face in shades blending to shadow.
A man looked good because I’d not
seen him before.
Fuck yes I pulled
a woman’s belt loop just to get
closer. I was low enough to touch
somebody’s This is me.
I’ve known
the darker the juice, the warmer the slur
of spit, acid, bile, and gut.
Some fifty times I’ve read Milton—
the pandemonium of dogs
crazy in love with born again,
chewing their way back in that beast
of a woman. Maybe sixty times.
I didn’t read the guy in the club
who pushed up on me, see the crowd
circling around to watch him grab
my thigh and break my strap. Off rhythm.
A hand in every -ism. Such
exoticism in the dark.
Circumlocution—
what is fault
if not a deed, done did, amiss?
Solution—
friend who took me home
and Yo, you know that guy was just
a racist troglodyte.
I looked
up troglodyte and teased my hair
so high it cleared the mirror, cracked
five teeth right out the wide-toothed comb.
I put my makeup on and broke
my face into a hundred pigments.
Some of the hues red as the part
of the mouth nobody ever sees.
John had a revelation, said he saw
a new heaven and earth. The first ones passed
away. This time there was no single sea.
I read the same verses. I saw the no.
I wrote a love poem to white
guys after learning hair
is just dead skin:
I want to pin
you down and brush against your chest.
You say, Damn, girl, your dermis is so
pretty. You say burn all do-rags.
You say grow it out. Go natural.
This is the moment when we refurbish ourselves.
Rising and falling, dust and dander, mites.
We need a black light and a microscope.
I want to see you shed. I want your sheath.
I wrote another after learning
orgasm comes from the Greek orgasmós
from organ, like swoll’ up—wrote, yes,
God bless my sense of this is our
body—that intersection—fucked
and fucker, gutted, gut. Boy, let
me get that subjectivity
again. My legs around your back
so you can carry me. I don’t
know if this means acceptance, though,
if I’m the part of us that dangles.
In bed, we’ll read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
together, like it’s some duet or two-
man play. You do your Milton voice that sounds
like Heston’s Moses, and you say Blake sounds
like that. I wax falsetto, using two
half notes: Genius, Harvest, Folly, Lions.
I claim the mouth of water, you the brick
brothel. We settle into Hell’s big brick
house typeset in its chambers: eagles, lions.
You get the vipers and the dragon-man.
We both get the desire, cloud, and fire.
When we’ve both had enough Maker’s to fire
kindling with our mouths, I say, Pretend we’re man
and wife, pretend we live together in
my Eden Avenue apartment here
in Cincinnati. Say we’re growing old here.
I’m Blake’s Raven and you are dawning in
the red wheat hardened in the fields. When, all
of a sudden, you aren’t smart enough to read
another section; your pale face is all
covers. I turn the light off, squint to read
the frost’s small cuts on the bare window’s page,
thinking of how luciferous means light,
how dawn should beg forgiveness with the light
on its back.
Dawn, an apologetic page.
New-powder snow fills the rim of angels.
I wonder when the weatherman will say
it’ll melt, when you’ll wake up, and whether I’ll say,
You won’t believe what happened to the angels.
They never speak the language of the body.
I have a dream I corner Gabriel and tell
him how, one time, I cored the moon and lived,
for a month of Sundays, warm inside its curve.
He whispers, Never tell, then tells me how
he holds dearest the best part of “Hail Mary,”
the Tupac song. He raps for me—Revenge,
next to getting pussy, is like the sweetest joy.
I tell him about evening and morning good.
He tells me of Eve’s leaves after the fall’s
exposure.
He reminds me of the verse
“Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.”
Hold it, he says. A few seconds at least—
but my crooked teeth are weary of their sockets.
They’re falling out in mounds as if my mouth
has held a hundred mouths. My hoodie’s pockets
can’t hold them all. Tomorrow, they’ll go south
in padded envelopes addressed to no
one at nowhere, enough Forever stamps
to take them there and back—because I know
there’s nothing to a molar’s bite, no clamps
tight in the jaw to chew something to raw
again—blood line, gristle, mouth spent—to spit
aside to save something to savor. I saw
a gullet so voracious it could fit
a How did it…? and all the gist ofWhere?
a woman lost too much of her to bare
in the middle of the mourning.
Martha bared
herself to Mary,Love? Give me exodus.
The leaving.
As we’re praising Lazarus,
you cry while I think, next to this,
the exequy, there’s nothing like the fuss
the body makes over itself.
Mmm. Rigor.
Liquids expelled and firm muscles, the bone
the only lasting truth that can’t transfigure
itself to something worse or better.
I’ve thrown
a stone into a brook to break my face.
I’ve scratched my skin to know just how it felt—
attacked by your own person. Kissed the pelt
of a sheep sick with blackleg.
There is space
when empty caves become the bodies’ tombs.
Space for going. That flight the air exhumes.
When Jeezy saidthat Jesus saidthe sky’s
our only limit, rap asked God who deferred
it to the dirt interred around the incus,
the anvil of the ear’s middle passage.
The body of us.
Never the heartbeat we’ve heard.
The breath before don’t.
Macon, GA. Miss Ellen Craft. The daughter
of a slave and her white master—i.e., slaughter.
Looks white enough to dress up like a white
man—i.e., sacrifice—and start the flight,
her dark-skinned husband playing her valet.
He’s dark enough, convincing in the way
he says Missus.
I wonder how the pants
felt on her thighs and if she had the chance
to clench a kegel.Or, did she say, Way
so soft? And know that soft can calcify?
We have a chance to rectify,
Black women.
Find your American Girl.
Kirsten. Bind her with butcher’s twine.
It’s her fault all black dolls were ugly.
You wished your hair would fall like that.
Now put her in the trunk and sit
on it. Light up a grape Swisher.
Swing by the Metro Mart to get
some Chester’s fried chicken and ask
the guy, Yo, where the 40s at?
so he can tell you how the law
won’t give you more than 32
and you say, Well, fuck the man.
Today you’re feeling petulant
and someone catcalled you with Girl,
you got some fat steak when your ass
is grown, and he was black and that’s
as bad as when the white guy thought
it fine to say he likes it native.
Feel sated. Lean back. Always ride
dirty. Say, Officer, I’m sorry
but I’m just going to have to play
it louder now. Go on and claim
your stake. If you want harder, you
should have to ask for it by name.
Be loud as Bathsheba’s song of Solomon.
Her verses’ husky bit of tenor. Range
we usually ascribe to men.
Verse one—
I knew David was watching me.Some strange.
I wanted it.
Verse two—I’m testament
to a woman real down to follow her gut
instinct for do-me.I will not repent.
Say Queen of Israel. Sang it, even.But
don’t think, Damn, that woman straight lusts for fame.
Your recognition is too short a story
driven by apparitions.
My real name
means daughter of oath. It’s like a mandatory
obligation to truth. But what if names lie?
What if I let my body testify
even after learning that some select
people can say grab them by the pussy? I,
with my rights and privileges, there, undo and elect
to sew my labia closed, using a butterfly
loop and Pantone Black 7 thread. It’s then
I’m most colored.
Bleeding.
Now the man who said,
You’re black even down there, girl,says, Say when,
woman.
I tell him I have never bled
the bright red of a finch;
but, often, I
assume the brown body of a cactus wren—
ass up, chest out. The strength enough to fly
through a closed door. Just bust inside where ten
flowers, evolvulus, are screwed, each hit
with a merciless sun.But they don’t wilt.
They will
their way through thirsty—thin bodies unfit
for death like a black woman standing, still.
(Still: up to and including now or time
mentioned; it’s all the same; nevertheless;
something like how my name will always rhyme
with America, oppress matching regress.)
Slaughterhouse says, Moving on . . .
and rap remembers
its recurring dream—the swim to Africa
where disembodied voices yell, There’s no
room for a hiraeth in your bones. But in
marrow, there’s substance, healing, narrow passage.
I walk through civilizations
of fire ants. No lamentations.
I am environment and genotype.
The southern cricket’s getting hype
while Ephesians says, Be completely humble.
I’d like to say I’ve seen a humble spark
not fizzle out or fuel a fire. Just
maintain within the limits of its burn.
I’d like to say I’ve seen a humble spark
turn into wood itself—deciduous.
Maintain within the limits of its burn
and never turn to ash. And maybe not
turn into wood itself.
Deciduous
milk teeth of children shed after a time
and never turn to ash and maybe not.
This time, don’t brush the fire off your shoulder.
Milk teeth of children shed after a time
of death. The gums drained of their blood. Feel it
this time. Don’t brush the fire off your shoulder.
Feel the burn of a baby’s bite on toughened nipples.
Apostle John saw the sun burn to a black
dark as sackcloth made of hair. The moon was blood.
I’m covering my head, like Kool
G. Rap said, in this red zone. Dead.
This ain’t no motherland, though fek-uhnd
as fuck.
Florida’s the only time
and place I’ve said, It’s a black thing,
you wouldn’t understand,like I
will never understand the love-
bugs fucking ass to ass,or man
standing his ground, shotgun in hand,
shooting at cans like they’re an unkindness
of ravens.
Seven years I have
mothered this nature into a woman.
The moon, her crevices, a tree
the sharpness of her tough skin split.
Eve knew she didn’t need a man to be
a mother. Didn’t need his rib/God’s hand
to be made. She was already every sea.
A month of Sundays. And the singeing brand
scarring the sky. Woman. The W.
Cassiopeia.
She said, I preceded you,
Adam. You didn’t have to fracture you,
break frame to find me.
True, I let you do
the work, putting in work. Sure. Own this land.
I am the ground and its fertility.
Now toil this:Yessir, you’ve been unmanned.
Call this in the beginning’s constancy
where there ain’t nothing but the cold and hollow
space of your chest.
I’m tidal. Taste me. Swallow.
I, myself, put a rock between my legs
as if I’d birthed it or fucked it dry.
Now I’m gonna let my nuts hang, Lord.
Between my legs, the eve of day’s
coming darkness stained with a word
sounding something like a destination—
When did we get to nigger? Just
how far is it to nigger?
Here.
I tell Lil’ Kim that nothing makes
this woman feel better than telling God,
See my slow goddess and my two
fists, same size as my beating heart.
Same fists, the size of my stomach.
Bleek says you sick with that fetish, that gotta eat,
and rap schools God and sustenance and hunt.