href="#u6ed23613-7670-5f3c-a0d8-4af34885aff0">People Are Unbearably Docile
♦
I’d Come Back from the Grave to Celebrate the End of Capitalism
Further Notes on the New Reconstruction
Just Because We’re Scared Doesn’t Mean We’re Wrong
Black Woman in a Bathtub, Twenty-First Century
Ars Poetica on a Twenty-Dollar Bill
WATERBABY
Nobody Special
Pick up my candles and dust them
I don’t know when the spirits get in
housework is done by nobody special
that’s the way it’s always been
Been working since I was a babe
I come home now and work for free
housework is done by nobody special
that’s the way it’s always been
I’m nobody special, nobody special
a washerwoman serving the cream
homemade confetti ready for them
playing with what they think of me
I’m nobody special, nobody special
seamstresses weaving our chains
no day off in a month of Novembers
busy making overalls for your gain
Dress up my candles and light them
I have a long long night ahead of me
housework is done by nobody special
that’s the way it’s always been
Been working before I was born
mother waiting on tables with me
housework is done by nobody special
that’s the way it’s always been
I’m nobody special, nobody special
waiting for some answers tonight
hoping somebody will hear me out
while the light keeps flickering, flickering
Middle Passage Messaging Service
for Wanda Coleman (1946–2013)
A word is an old story. One word, many stories,
one body, many bodies. To this day they move
across our line break lives & before we are
archived, lungs crackle with smoke until words
form in the long struggle smuggled on impact,
a thunderstorm bites & my world is a prayer
with a moon & all the birds from way back but
my throat is a blue cache of contraband winds,
when it’s brutal please help keep our language
thriving on big mama river is the word maroon.
Forbidden trees storages of lives pressed page
flowers herbs in their barbarian jailships on the
horizon bones shake with births & coughing,
keeping it down catching sick on the landform.
In life I live in the cold foliage of their unreason,
walking
