I WANT TO RECORD ALL OF THE SOUNDS THAT COMFORT ME AND THEN PLAY THEM ALL AT ONCE IN A WAY THAT IS BEAUTIFUL

IF I DID THIS YOUR VOICE WOULD CARRY THROUGH EVERY ROOM IN YOUR HOUSE, EVEN IF THE WALLS WERE THICK

I THINK YOUR LAUGHTER WOULD BE THE MOST PREVALENT SOUND, FOLLOWED BY RUSTLING LEAVES IN AUTUMN

I WANT TO CARRY A SMALL PLASTIC BABY IN MY POCKET BECAUSE ONE TIME ROSIE WAS SEEING THIS GUY AND UPON SEEING HER COLLECTION OF SMALL PLASTIC BABIES, HE PULLED ONE OUT OF HIS POCKET AND THATS WHEN SHE KNEW HE WAS IT

I DO NOT NEED A PLASTIC BABY IN MY POCKET TO KNOW YOU’RE “IT”

FUCK.

I invest in flashbulbs
like one would
in the stock market.
Unlike money
the returns I hope for
are rather tranquil.

Each bulb that lights up
the non-expanse of my room,
illuminates its own designated space
often notifying me of details too harsh.
These 25-watt-filament-inventions
make corners beam like centres;
turn a night of rest
into chandelier dinners.

I purge conversation out of myself,
What I don’t utter I swallow,
(parentheses serve no purpose)
I birth the disquiet.

            Be Honest
Stop fidgeting, breathe slow
Get water, smell fridge for chemical smell.
Drink water with chemical taste,
Dump water, pour another cup
Drink water, it’s alright
Avoid chemical fridge food, think about money
Drink water, stare at hot screens
Get high, look at poems

            Pay Attention
Stop fidgeting, breathe slow
Go to drink from empty cup,
think about chemical water
Drink from the sink
Sit in the sun naked, masturbate
Think about food
Think about work
Think about the food at work
in it’s perpetual staleness as i offer it to people

Pour chemical water in the empty cup
Pour chemical water in a yellow bucket,
When I’m open people love it so
they show up and expect something
but I’m working
don’t force yourself on me

            Be Honest
why are you here?
i’m trying to fund me and mine’s life
and all the trips to overpriced
Center City food marts. it’s clear
you don’t want to pay for me
you don’t want anything but nastiness

            Pay Attention
this is the last you get
my throat is wet
my thirst is gone though
Chemical Water on my breath
suck my chest, this is the last you get
(i’m only half here as always)

            Be Honest
Stop fidgeting, breathe slow
people never see themselves out
your attitude is fine but
your comfort costs mine
i like to be alone in the morning

I. We begin to tessellate
entering havoc—

Gland unwrapped tin
foil rain
harbors the burning
thought
trundled up&up—
How to make a team:
ride stolen horses
slow horses, in the south
yr betting on
a reprisal
to unclaw yr face
In the interim
take down the threads
transcription
Bit lips clarisonous
demit

Rapid diffusion
heaped depth crashing
hoped conjunction
wins: mountains
sloped into the sea—

Prostrate before yr death
instinct
furrow a maze a way
rapid passing phantoms
will fluctuate

coom? Combust, earth
unwinding barrows — rake
deserts
poppled with no one
home

II. We who disband
rayed from the same
source billow to
me,
Earth you tore it roots
simulacra
Parental gods
defunct plates
subduct — crumbling
errant dreams, we seize
mother my tourniquet
flames circles end
joining

And I pass out
a string — cords
defibrillate clairvoyancy

Stumbleforms
Theedge

Storms Heaven disturbs
Us

Littered yr bier
break bread come to be
born again:

Reflective way signs
parabolic-dispersed bending
matter is
snagged chapel bells
dumbly lolling over
The earth the earth

is mordant? Frags comminuted
a rapid transit
frustrated, a tone
bell curves swollen
with the sense you were
always leaving

My body in the field
electrical power lines
current ex
current ex

Relegated chasms
function to me you were/always
function to me?

III. Consummated sweeping
stars don’t know
why they’re eating
It recurs it
is everything
And I’m looking at it righthere

I want to feel that curly coarseness, touch
The nape with care and dry the dew from hair
Belonging where my chest is facing up.
A shower’s steam decreases, granted time and air.

We breathe the marijuana leaf abed
With heavy lids and tones of blue from news
Disseminating murders, dreadful dregs.
We fill the alcohol and drink a few.

A lullaby can loll us better, babe.
You know it, too, so play a music tune.
The scattered clouds and parted drapes, the scape
Of stars recall to mind the children’s room.

We strive so they relax asleep at night.
You think the stars relate to sacrifice?

“Dear Mama Africa” [i]

I was seven when I first heard the Click Song.
In dance class my feet first grazed World
music. Xhosa steps where I could not bend my tongue.
Qongqothwane—tonal, older than verse. Mother
language knocking. My limbs stretched far as African
drums, the voice of our first home.

Your syllables a knocking beetle, chant a homing
bird exiled, returned only in song
to evolving and ancient South Africa,
birthing hips of the world.
Your lullaby in our first mother’s
tongue.

Each diphthong tongued
healing, until you could return.
You only wished to bury your mother—
lost a whole country. Song
moving you on through the world.
What it means to have a voice that carries Africa.

Miriam, healer’s daughter, the West’s whole African
vision in your elusive tongue.
Did they know you hummed of witch doctors? This world
you turned toward your home?
Medicine music at once singing
to free your people, your mother

country. Voice so vast they called you Mama
Africa,
witch-doctor beetle, striking continents in song.
Though I may never lift my tongue
like yours, my steps point me home
to a beginning across a fractured world,

Most languages of the world
draw on the root, Mama,
to name the woman who is our first home.
Woman, what would I ever know of Africa
but pain if not for the dance of your tongue,
the hard road beaten in your song?
Your beetle steps knocking at the world’s past and future, at Africa,
mother who chanted it, clicking your healing tongue,
melody beating a nation’s triumph, the road home in your song.

---

[i] The “Click Song” is a Xhosa folk song popularized by Miriam “Mama Africa” Makeba. It is sung at weddings and tells of a knocking beetle, which is supposed to bring the couple good fortune. Children also use this beetle to point the way home.

My mother wants the dead to go away,
tired of how they pop up among the list of the living,
in whatever the last profile picture they selected
not knowing it was the last. Perhaps next to last
because they’d been thinking about giving up
social media, eventually, or perhaps not everything,

perhaps just the games
of colorful chains and timers,
hoping for a boost from friends.
There’d be one more picture before that, right?
One more after they’d lost the weight,
one more after they got those partials,
one more after the tan lines faded,
but certainly not the last, forever floating
on a yellow raft in someone’s backyard pool.

---

there is no forgiveness
in the way Fereshte
slathers henna into my scalp
I have never felt a love that pulls at my roots
so bitterly
there is an intimacy in this anger
she holds not in her face
but in her finger tips.

moments ago
I said something I should not have said
though it is trying to avoid trespass
in a home bursting with forbidden names
we walk not on eggshells
but on damp clay that smears silently across carpeted floor.

henna stains leave an earth-red scent that hovers over everything
despite the hours we spend on our hands and knees
scrubbing
praying
it is no use.
Fereshte says
I used to be somebody, you know
and I tell her I know
she says don’t look at me now
and I don’t dare turn back
my neck aches in stillness
the dough she kneads
a crumbling masterpiece.

—for Karen Dalton

i.

When I ask for voice,

She brings me firewood.

                                    (It’s an accident to need her)

&, when I pick at grasses,

She graces my tongue

With her picking, as if she combs

The rabbit of her blues

With my white-haired commas.

ii.

                                    (& I am grim with grammar)

When I brush the bark

Of my history, her eyes

Pierce me from tree holes, black

Out impossibility,

Crow me to new questions.

This is the deep well

Of her look, the sap of her smirk.

iii.

This what fastens.

                                    (For she will stick to you)

iv.

When I see her walk a hill,

She flings off

My woman’s crooked look.

She is to rove. This is the crook

In her, the bristle.

She won’t be known.

v.

When I go to love her, I see I’ve already

Sucked her dry, & she is shooting up.

She is shooing me away,

Shot with beyond.

vi.

                                    (In her wilderness is wilderness is wildernesses)

She dreams where few women sleep,

Runs where few patter, but

When she parts her lips, she cracks

My cabin floorboards wide open.

I don’t understand the question…Is this about opening my mouth or about the visibility of my blood? Is this about me or my mama? The litany of women? I guess you would have to ask my girls, who scrub the stone streets before they drag me about how quiet I get when I remember, when the sadness hits. Everyone who knows me has said I don’t know how to be sad, but I just think sadness and my body are incompatible. I can feast on rage without my body dissolving in shakes. I can drown in lust…Does that not answer the question? I think vulnerability is when you let someone else dress your wounds, but I like the way I clean myself. I’m tender headed you know so there’s a way I like to move through the matting. There’s a way I like to drain myself. Sometimes when I want to be honest about the searing edges of any wound I gag instead. I sleep. I tell a crude joke about his dick. About our lack of sex and lots of humping and tongue and tongue. Then I get really funny and I cry laughing about death and about how he must think I’m crazy. It’s funny really. I swear. You’d have to be there…Well no, he doesn’t laugh. He usually just looks concerned but he does hold me tighter. I do text my girls though just to say hi, and I’m drowning, and I’ll see them on the other side.