INHERITANCE: THE FORCE OF APERTURE

“Accused Killers Had 3-Way Sex On Black Corpses?”—BlackAmericaWeb.com (2-18-13) “Three Negroes lynched at Duluth, Minn. for rape. Oct, 1919 by mps”—etching on photo postcard of the lynching

Fascinated, spooked into desire, the jarring

appetites of the living. Some men soak

black skin in fiction and knock stories back

like a shotgunned body. Impartial, the ground,

trees, and rivers hold artifacts of flesh impaired

by those demanding privilege, their wild aesthetics.

Black bodies and their high aesthetic

value: teeth, toes, and severed penises in jars

strangely priced. A post card, violent mail,

shows the photo of three men lynched in Minnesota.

To look is to be welcomed by the white foreground

of faces like flashes lighting the spectacle, turning back.

Study these bodies, these leather-bound books back

to back, like a good pupil, I hear, then attempt art.

I read about two black boys strangled, made background

for moaning white bodies. Canopic jars

made of the mind, fetish museum made miniscule

by killers speculating darkly what the dead can bare.

Body a book of vulgarities: famine, ravage, jarring

light, encounter, theft. Savage not made new but grounded

in what was always possible. Flesh a morbid center

unwound, skin carved into familiars. Western artists

negrotized their brushes, painted African masks over bare

canvas. Did aesthetes go blind when the myth looked back?

Were Misters Clayton, McGhie, and Jackson beautiful

portraits hung in Duluth, Minnesota?

Were Misters Glover and Rankins rare collections? The snare

of white faces stark against night’s mocking background

caught me looking in, caught me imagining backs

bent as though before kings, our mouths open like jars—

Our dead, once forced to reject the ground

for rope and air—sky hued erotic there

in the leaves—now forced to the ground, backed

into morning headlines, their minced codas

between weather and traffic, a jarring revision:

white writhing over black, the American aesthetic.