Vigil wax pourover monarch wings I Flutter too, I zilch. Like so I’m sealed to the desk In the preparation: unaligned pelvis Compelled crossly to bear like an unticked timeline Ritual oil of greens Rituals of smell basins Rituals of chewing consideration And casting off nails rituals of debasing Based mucus like which calcifies the virus Rituals of shedding blood Onto cotton, useful blood. Some people believe in families Some intimacy believes We need need, each other, unfolding protection in mucosity Human insides. How can we hold enough Back, how can we protect But say enough to say yes? Manifesting. Now Let the people come
Category: Writing
moment’s exuberant windchime
pulling nuance from our breath as light teases a prism into revealing itself falling and rising worried wings melt down to arrogant wax waxing and falling relaxed resistance as one examines another for tears I will make happiness fall out of your ears (your dwelling) I am here I am here (your dwelling) I am here!
reddit says / structure test
Jackass asking me if I'll help pull a bike rack Onto Hennepin. Clang of metal on asphalt Is right and wrong, like screaming the answers during a standardized test. Jackass asking me if I'll hold the chain-link open for him To slide under, his face close enough that the icicles in his beard melt into my ear. He tags the concrete AMIR LOCKE Murdered by MPLS cops He tags Shoot back! and squirrels to anonymous safety. Afterward, a medic on a bike tells me that this squat embarrassment adorned in chain link is the 5th precinct. Then they give me a burrito I use it as a handwarmer. Night of suspicious openings. Wary of being kettled with that Helicopter threatening the sky. Amir Locke written in dust on a party bus Party bus parked sideways blocking traffic. A man runs out of Popeyes and joins us, bless him, most drivers avoid our eyes as we weave between their frustrated vehicles dragging traffic cones and recycling bins behind us like caught fish. Helicopter stalking us from 1700 feet, but Why won't they meet us in the street? Rarely have I felt as powerful than with J on my left and O and K on my right staring down stopped traffic and then Oh happy accident The gardener who tended the flowers In George Floyd Square Walks by on a Friday night date And he moves to speak of warmth and his everywhereness Our everywhereness Shivers come into me Until I'm dancing Amir Locke in the red paint someone launches over the fence at the precinct. Why won't they meet us in the street? There's nowhere to escalate, and the cold so we disperse. In the somber car home K moves to speak the truth: Our four white bodies should be background at an abolitionist protest. Yes. And- I would rather be background here Than anywhere else. Our numbers kept us safe. We keep us safe. This was a structure test - A test that makes us stronger. Reddit says there was rioting in downtown MPLS over the weekend - No. This was no uprising. This was a structure test - That day will come.
mouth and tentacles poem
No matter how slow we go the dogs will follow us down. If they're mean dogs they'll hurry us if they're good dogs they'll hurry us. Friends! - friends know when to hustle a lie through tactical customs, circumventing cancerous trailers, like the kind the Feds provided to the houseless after Katrina. [Fatal trailers, and still in use today.] A dog finds sweetness on a salty cheek, as do I. Pull me sweetly. I surrender. I let go. Pull me in closer - I see your mouth - Ah! it’s full of mouths - I see the walls of teeth of mouths - I see the moon - bitten - nursing - Euclid's geometry - no - Non-Euclidean geometry - no - It's double lips - a talking cross - roads - It's winter, dead as toads - no - Sleeping - a catalog of spell starters - a dream carnival - Now she's drooling - now a tongue in the wall - Sated with a tip of dew tasting - Walk among your dogs.
lucid dream as transferrable fluid
I'm circumstance, inducting good luck out of ash snow. I'm lull, basement pianos sunk in rhymed windows. Sensitive is the cell that tells you right from wrong. Touch the thick hair growing on the shower wall. Festival, whose god is dead? Not mine. I'm the prowling countryside. I'm the living sculpture, the maternal sigh enveloping The built world The uninhabitable world The male world. Under ammonite stars Under amniotic waves Alert for parousia, which always arrives. My god is of us unveiling by the hundreds.
Note: this poem is in conversation with Luce Irigaray’s 1982 lecture “Love of the Other,” reproduced as an essay in the 1984 book An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
poem for digging up rocks (putting googly eyes on them)
for gbe.
Throw a rock it must Sit where it lands. That's how I feel accepting another unexpected run-in, Sun to rock synergy, And he's wearing pearls. Before, there we were. Flesh of a wrinkled-sheet morning, fish of light buttering the ceiling Opal screens winking, I sustain, I'm good like corn pancakes. And the covid-weather is mild. So considering, we went. Friends teabag Fluid osmosing thru their thought bodies. The stars point downward. We were six hours late to the function. But for tangerines- bitch, free food is free. I dozed in the car I danced in my soup. The more I shouldn't The better it is, we call that forbidden makes the fruit. Isomorphically I'm a wool-eyed yes before we hit the vote. My lubed throat Unfit, stitched with paranoia, lying or denying or imagining covid tickle. I'd rather not know. Never going to maintain friends this good Once they know. I should say no more often than a rock Which can't. Moon trickles into the bathroom and I follow her Looking for restless vibe-check or better yet Principles, and she leads me out, to where the people are, and then you call, Just to show off the disappointment in your voice. Perfect. Here, let me practice. Pedestal-carver, Let me let you down easy, Let me let you down.
That sucks.
We are, thank you, doing just fine. Between forkfuls of cheese S. thrice mouths the word Assault. Twice she invites me to anger and I do, expanding space-time as a witness nighttime eyeballs-in-the-bush. I tell her, That sucks! Kicking my own sins quiet under the table. I am maybe overeager, to take up responsible arms. To perceive is to suffer. To conceive- Of her filial mood as playing princess on the veranda, cantilevered property, waving, cold, lonely. Our waiter sweltering under two masks, us eating out on some narcissist sputter of puissance, adulting like lubed artifacts shine the anal end of innocence. But I am here. Alcoholics well-labelled. So is S. Bellwether multitude. Our flocks giggle us. We're ditzy like the toddlers, how they laugh at pooping in the toilet, Here it comes, here it comes, there it goes, there it goes... Have you noticed every story is about going home? Let's go home. Home hours later O. and I calling on our Latino neighbors because our landlord just died, which makes for convenient evictions. V. answers the door with her giant baby and invites us in, wet boots and all. V: we don't speak much English. Me: hablo un poco Español... then three miles of time crawls by while I'm mutely remembering how to talk and V. has already called her husband J. to mediate between us women, which is practical but shames me, and what does she feel? I say Eviction, tripping over it, like I was trying to say it and not say it at the same time, it could happen, but it might yet not. V. is justifiably stressed and hunted and attends to the house and the escaping baby to envelop them in place while traveling through time, our bilingual conversation. The walls are dirty. The plumbing is broken. The landlord is a bastard. The landlord is a bitch. The landlord is an ingrate, he stole money from me. The landlord is a miser, he upcharged our electricity. May he rest in peace. Will you come to our Tenants' meeting on Tuesday? I understand my own Whiteness best as it relates to power and who wields it, and this is my neighbor's house. It’s a house at risk of losing its people. That sucks. Again, again everybody: Tenants' Meeting on Tuesday. The more tenants we can get together in one room, the more power we have, the less chance of anyone being evicted. It's a seed-debris game. The sowing of seeds explosively expands space-time. Expanding, cooling, slowing: My home currently precariously Had: let's go to that Had home now and think privacy thoughts. A bed, a bed, a bath, a book. A bundle of January herbs dry and bitter on a hook. The perverse desire to matter balanced with the cooperative need to act, and act correctly. Balanced and empty for now, though I could talk or make love forever. I take my literature and grow it, at the speed of bloody conception, home.
I refuse to get a handle on
Flossing. Fingers slip slimy almost as frustrated as a hungry Toddler armed with banana, But unable to peel, the snack prerequisite. Inchoate fingeys Flossing, and my teeth gossip blood, ubiquitous weak point. I bite my peel. Excited for the next life, sans teeth.
Parting of Be and Loved
for L + C.
once Be and Loved have split
because they needed space to grieve
Be recuperates within Himself
making familiars of limitations
like neck bones that greet each other
with pops like keyboard click
Burst & wait. Like typing "hey"
Be has:
nauseating
blood to the stomach requiring
cat-paw massage
and Loved, no longer responsible for maintaining
the identity of two-of-them
is released into present tense,
shivering Her bra off in a room
empty, at last,
like running and carrying nothing
like running fingers into snowmelt touches
relief into her face.
Be off in a bird's nest
in a nestled lock
As little children know they're gods
Loved moves in her own right of neediness,
casting manipulative spells on her friends
pride swelling like a bad hip
Loved Be
spines spit-rotating in sleep
the Beloved reunites
not yet
when fathers are recovered from stroke,
so maybe never, when separation rites
fail to blue the moon
not yet.
don’t be shy, we all got high
A friend. Let's call him M
was dating, I mean seeing on dates
and seeing in dreams
of future dates, which always involve spontaneous paintbrushes,
M being an accomplished hoarder of art, trash,
and other sex positions, M was dating
someone from Kenosha,
who was merced (his softening of murdered) by Rittenhouse
fifteen months ago,
and tonight M is on the floor, at our house, amid
a wreckage of mugs and sense memories,
angry, getting up, pounding head,
and laying back down, like any worker
working through this world of trauma:
he saw me watching him hand-roll and said
don't be shy.
A cousin. Let's call him S
was flying high, as in, he was a pilot,
training, until he actually got in the cockpit solo
and panicked under the gravity of responsibility,
imagine flight as void pregnancy, one drink too many and
a hundred boatlike moms and diarrhea babies wave bye-bye
anyway S vomited and vertigoed
down, down until the cold white psych ward
for threatening to kill a cop and his brother and himself.
my family is white. when we're sent to a room
that feels like ourselves not listening, we think,
I deserve to die here. it's not helpful.
S is in the ward now. I'm not helping,
I'm with M saying to him nothing he needs to hear (not listening)
because I'm pretending I'm talking to S
so many crossed wires it's hardly talking at all.
I want to show both the way I crawled out,
but when I turn around, it's tiny as a chicken-hole
made narrow with shit. don't be shy.
I used love as a hitch, let it tug me from place to place.
don't be shy. so M and us we all got high.
there's no redeeming my anger at S, this poem or the death it hides. this poem ripped its way out like a fart. sorry. violent: it just had to come out.
cdzhouse 