drowned stories struggle,
silent memoirs, the cooking stoves are loaded
on the horizons cargo & people to this day
they run the sea months mouths housetraps.
Tearin the roof off this cold cruel mothafucka
outside the towers of excess is fluid smoking,
language tundra rumbling running ear nose
& throats tarsus tomes winking out of their
power plants, good & plenty different worlds
tearjerkers crybabies they got no memories
of their own cruelty waterlogged lifesickness.
To cry so hard is to laugh to laugh so hard
is to cry writing with the smoke is the word,
is an old story of our lives of the horizons in my
mouth, I bite the stories that drowned me in
their books with a moon & our real stories.
We live within the fugitivity of a thunderstorm,
lung-red caches formed from struggle from
walking from counting the siq seas mouthing
directions the language cargo of Black code.
We got all the words for how we got here,
where we are going & how we will get there.
All Kinds of Fires inside Our Heads
The number of bodies I have
is equal to the number of
gurney transfers that are
televised.
If we’re all “just human”
then who is responsible?
A fire station drying out
from addiction. Outside
the drizzling of firepower,
lowballing suns.
It’s like a sauna in here,
the strain of a charred
bladder. Bottled water,
bad wiring.
That spark is no good.
Come sit with me for a
minute. My feet full of
diluted axe fluid.
Thought I heard you say
everything is medicine.
But that’s just hearin
what you wanna hear
This Body Keeps the Keys
My dear sparkly-eyed polyps,
I don’t have enough juice to
be the sole joist of this family
today,
so I dream of claw-foot tubs
where I splash unapologetic
on how deep this umbilical gets
slumped from getting over,
hair unwashed, toenails randy
as hell because I am sincerely
mothered the fuck out, so tired,
this mothering body,
shellac lying facedown on a
coastline ashing & mottled
pockmarked canker sorrel
no good pictures of myself.
Skinbag workhorse bb creamery,
constant upkeep of management
cultivation of self-care cosmetic
Black pride goddess goddamn!
This shit gets tiresome putting so
much effort into what doesn’t last,
sometimes I want to retire shave
my head be a nun or a monk,
just so I can forget all the years
time bludgeoned so I could look like
somebody else swimming around
in their own pallid wheel of tears.
Yemaya, what is to become of us.
I drag my body around lovingly but
it still won’t let me go
Dirt Floor
for May Ayim (1960–1996)
The overseers are buried aboveground in containers that won’t
incinerate, and the workers who made the stones to fit their bodies,
dead from lung disease, are stalked by the heavy, wet coughs of their
bosses.
In the shaky global clay, the coral reefs are dying from pneumonia. My
grandfather packed crates of blank tombstones at the granite quarry
for a living and the sea being what it is speaks of these connections. I
know when I’m being haunted,
I know when I’m being asked. So we search together through the
trenches of buried papers, brown women shoveling, worried for the
health of our backs. We are a bouquet of spines pressed into the
dirt floor, gathered in strength for you, so you can rest here without
loneliness.
