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JAGGED SERENADE
SONG OF THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN
Sing steady, woman, as you draw
the life jacket flush against your torso.
Sing before you thread survival
commands through the toddlers’ ears:
Hold on to me. Do not let go.
At dry dock, the men carved this barge
from a solid slab of hubris. Now it sinks,
woman, and its sinking begs your presence
no more than its crafting called for.
Leave the men to what they call destiny.
For them, what will be nobler than dying
in the belly of their handmade whale?
Leave them thinking, “This devouring,
we invited upon ourselves”—they’ll come
no closer to believing their hands are fate’s.
There is no space for your resentment
in the life raft nor in your gut—that hold
just above your birthing grotto. Fill yourself
with the song—sing. Do not sink. You must
be buoyant. When rescue is slow to arrive,
you will need to drop anchor, give
the ocean your limbs. Swell, become
some small continent—terra firma where
the children’s soles can rest. Damp. Shivering.
Let them hide in your scalp’s forest. Lie. Sing
that their fathers were towed home—corpses pulled
over seas’ sharp lips, swallowed by distant orange.
SUPREMATIST SWEET NOTHINGS
~after Malevich
My mouth is a hammer without
a handle or a handle
with an absent strike-head—a black bar
that could be a violin. My mouth’s
ballad: Every piece of you
feels like a nail
against my lips. Sweet impact
—reverberation—draws me
again to the Rorschach of your form:
its archipelago today,
its crucifix yesterday,
its graffitied moth tomorrow.
Mirror, mirror—so many shapes
we become when we see not skin
but our own bald desires grafted
over each other’s soft faces.
Speak your want. Speak my body
into a wind chime—a body
all clanging and imperceptible bones.
Then speak simply
for the sake of breath’s nudging.
Make of me not song but singing.
O, BRIDE
~after Roy DeCarava’s “Graduation 1949”
There is such a thing as local apocalypse.
You know this is true because I left you
there on the corner of do you take
and till death—standing in that dust lot.
How stark your dress in that caucus
of shadows. How stark the promise
upon which you forever gaze: a white-walled
Chevrolet on worn billboard, inside
a family—”white”—pasted in our dark land.
You should have known
that advertisement would never be us,
not in this nation of brown
ghettos urged to eat
themselves. Riots—not indigestion
but famishment sated with fire,
cracking glass, and blood.
The Black, the White—this country’s beloved
abstractions. Sunlight, too, has made
two of you—one fabric, one shadow.
Fabric still waits for me. Shadow accepts
that I’ve been swallowed by the maw
of city blight. Shadow knows
the detritus and brick, knows it is now
wedded to an abandoned hand-drawn cart,
to a burden that must be gathered, like light,
and towed toward a dawn beyond the lens.
BEASTHEART
I feel just like a stranger in the land where I was born.
~RICHIE HAVENS
You grope beneath the bed for the dated,
dusty phone book you last used
to kill a wolf spider. Your fingers flip
toward the Ds. You want “Dojo,”
but phone books lack such sophistication.
You regroup your digits, span
“Embroidery” “Fire” “Glaziers”
“Hypnotherapists” “Insurance” “Jewelers”
until you find a number under “Karate,”
which you dial. When a voice greets you,
you tell the voice, “I’d like to learn
how to hurt people.” There is some edict
under which the voice cannot promise
to grant such requests, but it’s a recession.
The voice says, “We’re having a sale on pain,
actually—two for the price of one.”
So many people you could invite to learn
the art of pain—to spar against—
and all that hurting would be condoned
inside the dojo. You can’t resist a bargain
as morning sunlight against your skin summons
rage’s larvae to poke through your pores,
and you begin morphing into that walking
abomination, the beastheart that despises
your “white” friends for the ease with which
they couple, the ease with which they offer,
“Try dating outside of your race” (ignorant
of all aside from color’s tattered flags
and where those faux boundaries lie).
The beastheart feeds off your frustration,
your cyclical failure at finding love
with another who is brown like you, negro like
you, human like you. Has America made
you inhuman for wanting to love someone
like you, birth someone like you?
Downtown, the array of lovers urges you
to rebuke the beastheart, its lust
for pain. You could join the blissful
binary of pale hand / brown hand
interlocked. “Breed the next Obama”
or unremarkable mulatto. “Mixed people
are the most beautiful, don’t you think?”
The beastheart doesn’t think. It hungers
to find a dojo and kick the crap out of all comers
because inside you are “black” in America,
because you tempt the beastheart every time
you try and fail at loving another person
wrapped in “blackness.” Knocked flat,
again. America towering over you
like Ali over Liston, like Love over Teddy P.
—crooning, “I think you’d better let it go.”
CAPTURE MYOPATHY
Men are myths of composure. (They’ll banish
a brother who won’t disguise his fear.) How sage
the moustache, how proven the jaw
on a real man, no? Then let a woman arouse
amorous pinpricks within him. He’ll muse,
“O, chère, you drive me to madness”—a ruse,
for madness is no destination, no land
separated from masculine by crimson bluffs,
nor is madness a pillaging horde
sent forth from women’s various lips,
sent forth to scale those cliffs
and raze the houses of men—upending them
onto their chimneys. Beneath their veneers,
men are stampedes—not of once-bitten beasts
but of ones who run because the world is
running around them. A man cannot flee
a threat he does not understand
without revealing he does not understand.
It calls for a c...
