To Skate On Sun

It’s 2023

I’m married to the king of the world, pregnant with his nation/ a queen, they say *wow*
It’s the seventh hour before noon, a second witching hour. I don’t even realize he’s awake, my back is against him my limbs threaded; I’m meditating, hoping to hear the second pair of lungs tremble inside of me. He kneels beside me, his hands snake around my middle - then a moment to ask permission - I exhale, he knows the escape of matter means peace. Never has my body fit so well in any space. No where else would my legs leave me. You’re inside of me and I’ve given up on dying for just that reason, you slow down *when you’ve got the time to take your time, steal it quick* and then it’s faster, faster there’s only a faucet between us, love
Every second takes us closer to the divine and further from this skin so lets build a tent in it, set it on fire.

AM 10 Min Freewrite

In approximately 10 minutes, I’ll be standing beneath an unload of the earth’s wet and beginning my day. I’m dreading the heat of the afternoon, hoping the smog finds some other overpopulated area to suffocate but I know I’ll have no choice except to bare it so I’m laying naked in my bed, right beneath my window enjoying the comfort of the thin air on my new body. My new body. Everyday I get smaller and smaller; I am disappearing and reappearing. I wrap my left arm around my torso and revel in how compact and nimble I feel in my own hands. I look down - straight down - my body is a vertical signal with peaks here and there, my small breasts finally in agreement with my cinched hips, my thighs stronger (which makes my walk more patient, my posture elegant) and I’m chopping away at the small, envious monster in my head - it wants to keep me young, ungrateful and at war. I am laying my sword out to rust, and thinking of trading it for a hatchet.

Freewrite 5/26 (Prompted by text convo w/ Aziza)

Wanna shop. But wanna eat Oreos and sleep. Wanna do my hair. Wanna talk to boys. Wanna play the sims, maybe. Wanna get lost today. Wanna get lucky. Wanna watch the time split across the sky. Wanna watch Arrested Development. Wanna be so high, I find it super funny. Wanna be so high I thank god for the turn down/the turn off/ my body is the high line today, strung across a film of cheap guilt. my body is bleeding literally expelling a 28 day tour of death/I want to have sex more than anything, want to draw someone into me like an empty space suckling full/ I don’t feel empty just half staff, maybe? Half glass, maybe? If you cast a stone/ I deflect/ it risk the open wound forever - do I win, or you? It’s interesting watching the top earth float over you, it’s mirror ironically it’s exact opposite (what it means to look down while looking up, empathy?) the sky gets it’s whole everything from the ocean, knows how to swag only from watching its father collect and swallow vast lands.

For Mike

You were born

a pillowed thing.

Come dancing out of

your mothers skin like a night of

new sex.

I imagine, the doctors pulled you

from her with no urgency

another mother lost in the

brass bellow of birth.

I imagine that one hummed

you quiet while another

covered her with taupe.

I think it amazes me

how she died for you.

I think it amazes me

how you speak of her

so preciously,

like every jesus you’ve ever

thought to know.

Four years ago,

someday similar to today

I carried you

20 blocks south of harlem,

walked ten of them with your

blood trailing behind us casually.

My left hand holding severed limb

to joint

our friends yelling to keep

you from abandoning

the summer of your voice

before it leaves you behind.

We walked ten blocks

and watched three police

caddies slow storm by us

and not stop.

We walked ten blocks

and thought you’d

died after each one.

We walked ten blocks

and couldn’t figure out

how it was worth it,

your life, a meat hook

in the flesh of a war you had not

started and could not stop.

Ten blocks,

a machete as long as the walk.

Ten blocks

my uniform drenched in

death’s sugar,

and no

prayer for this gourd

of trouble.

I think you are an impossible octave.

In another life,

Ra buried me in a league

of brothers and somehow,

I made it

back into this world

with just you.

We laugh now,

touch your scar

with ginger and vinegar

make fun

of how you can

only feel it vibrate in two fingers.

(23/30) Here in The Room of My Life

Inspired by Rachel McKibbens Writing Exercise #93

Here, in the room of my life
The window exhibits an access point.
Though the rain is coming, the poinsettias thimble
against the malt backdrop and stand firm.
Nighttime is my favorite gift, it’s meter long presence
An oak mask for the weary.
I lie still, let the dark wash take me over - decide to pray
That way, my body flat against the open hand of
Gravity
My blood calling the bell, ringing it forward.

I could die this way, you know?
Napping through the middle of the moment.
Impressed with my own quiet,
Loving the snare of displaced light
Loving the deep blue magic that
pulls
it too
close.

9/30: Christianity and How Black People Got Got

You? You’re a rock.

God is the dirt beneath you.

It pushes you up, up,
A pedestal
God says “I give you eyes”
suddenly the horizon
Is at your nose, you see
The cityscape which
Doubles as
everything, He says.

But is it your nose?
Touch it with your right —
you have no hand,
Because you’re a rock.
If you have a nose, but
No hand to touch it…?

God gave you eyes
And he said that with those
Eyes, the horizon
Is right there
At your nose
So you look
keep looking
At what you think to be
Nose/horizon
confuse them for each other
And regard your vision
As endless/a vertical eternity.

You can stop being a rock, now.
Be something more animate,
The New Testament allows that,
And we’re in an age of religious
Progression
So, now go
be a woman/mother.

Look. I take your son.
Anything done in my name
Is exempt from the cool
Chuckle of tragedy, so
It was a favored death, so
Actually - I did you a favor.
You weep and call my name,
I fill you up
Up
Up
Your faith is a white climax
Slick and withholding
Spill out
Spill out

What pain?
The only thing oppressing
You is your lack of glory.
Say my name.
Say it louder.
I don’t believe you.
I take another son.

What pain?
The only thing oppressing
You is sin.
Say my name.
Say it louder.
I don’t believe you. Your loyalty
Lessens the lash —

Keep quiet for me,
Precious,
My capacious hand/a canyon
Of your few breaths/I take the
Day/replace it with tea light —

That’s the sun now. That’s all you
Get. Don’t you dare look up,
though. Don’t you dare
Look
Up.

Champagne/Stale Cheese 2/30

Near midnight
The upper west side
Is more dank than my old hood.

No clean bone meets the
Mouth of ecstasy
Like the High,
The still born momentum.

I’m home now,
Emboldened in the
Coffee of early morning

I’m mad about some shit
Some valid shit
When good things happen to
Me, I forget that the cyclone
Still carries a leg of
The ocean it left behind.
I forget to feel the burn
Of the red things,
As if by doing so
I’ve set the bath
To drown the others.

But this L
Settles.
I submit to
the republic of my full lung.
It’s all good,
Big says

All good.

1/30: Blurry

When your heart is sad

All you want it is to jump the fence

Serve yourself an amiable drink

Pink, maybe

Bright with Svedka

I imagine our children

Brown, the moon’s furnace.

I watch your tripe mannerisms,

Your mouth pouting/ your stoic

Dance.

I speak too soon, sometimes

Give my mouth a yard to stake

Though neither I, nor it, can afford to

Interpret the measurement

You love me?

What does that

Look like? Which high mile did

It ascribe to/ what song does

It skip?

Eve

Yo, Girl: (About Love)

It’s the shock that
Hits you,
Full on.

It’s the bare chill of the moment
The bustle of
How to continue,
no leg or two?
It’s the question you ask in a billion
different ugly cadences, your
impenetrable fear rising like fire,
an animal of flight
And the answer that never comes.

no leg, or two?

You calculate your own relevance and make joke of it.
So, what?
It is immeasurable,
No limbs for transport.
Did you intend to sell it? Buy it back? Give it away?

Did you know?
There is no room left for the
Anomaly
You do the trek
As did the women
Before you
Their honor stinging forever,
You are required to do it well
You stretch pink across the sky
For the thing that pulses
With the same 1, 2 percussion
As yours.

You fail your own yearning
By attempting to comfort
It.

Loss is loss,
In this face or

His or
Some other.

And if it kills you
What do we do with your blood?

Stuck in 1967

She was 12, then 

Bow legged, gap kneed 

Brown skin churn yellow

Interrupts the sun’s 

time to glaze honey. 

Girl use amp voice to

Cheer Brooklyn

Girl can stomp/shout

In equal time

But now girl is 55 and

Looks like some paperback 

Aged her

Girl is 55 and thinks she is still

35, and 21, and 12

Girl’s boyfriend is 50 year amass 

Of sudden movement

And she is in conflict, now

With the keep up. 

The entire train car stares as

He uses the gas blue bench

To hoist his body towards

The deities 

He tears the “are you addicted to marrijuana?” ad from its cold plastic

Holster

Laughing like a baby grand 

As the subway patrons

Stare/curious about the

Habit of children. 

What I Mean Is: Be Careful

Spring comes to sin against us.

My sister sends a picture over text of
a tulip invading the bulb of her soft
brown mouth. She is darker than me, and therefore
retains sun like gold. Off to the corner of the focus, a peculiar boy,
Pale/ominous like an overcast Sunday
watches the tulip sprouts from her lips,
The crystal of his eyes
Bold and thick.
I text back
“You are so beautiful, you remind me of all the things people lose and find again.”

She thinks I am the head big sister
of the Big Sister Clan
Holds my sound in every
pocket she owns
Wants to talk like
Me/think like me
Doesn’t know the discovery
Commits an endless crime.

In the bath, I scrub at my body
With wonder and shame.
All I ever do is make
myself bleed.

Why She Still Answers Your Call (Tanka Form Poem)

“10 PM is fine.”

My mouth, a trained oasis -

the reason you stay,

home sick/void of manual

dreaming any lie it can.

Girls Who Stay

The summertime was a fluorescent slumber
seeping into our clothes, weighing us
heavy. I am singing to the floor
of your cathedral, all the light in the
town has dimmed, a poisonous dusk settling
over the dish of heat drunken bodies.

Its winter and the cold is a peninsula
dressed in dead water. I fall in love with
you each time I am woken by the sweat
of being too close to another body. It is enough
to keep the time stifled and the pain a scabbed
risk. Before I can catch
myself, I am holding your voice in my
cheek, signing your name with it,
forging my own.

When The Boulder Strikes and You Commit to the Relearn of Walking

for A

Sign your name.
Eat.
Drink water.
Vomit.
Sit at the bowl of the
basin and heave.
Make your chest
a pressurizer
beat at it.
Breathe.
Eat.
Sign your name.
Read about the country
that owns him
now and do not wonder
about the threat of a yellow
drought.
Your motherland
is what housed him best
fed him fresh water
and kale
red as the south
side of your hands.