Homeland
The breaking was tremendous. All we could say
in our silences was all we knew of this descending
dark. Our flames burned like the dendrites we lit
when we touched in forbidden spaces in the days
when space itself was forbidden––except when you
were claiming, making, owning, taking it, and we
were twirling tiny leotarded dancers in the wind.
We would not go gently, we whispered, refugees
from ourselves, from the forever metals and the
concrete that no one would name except when
they were about to be paved.
We laid hands into its give, as if to take it back
and heal what was choking beneath it, as if to say,
Look. That was me, I was here, and the roles were
forever ambiguous: the hero or the damned, the sailor
or the slaughtered, the seventh son or the seventh daughter
in a row buried up to her neck for seven days in the heat,
learning to wait.
My people are not the ones to tell you how to think, and I
spent lifetimes wishing they were but we are fluent in the
language of losing it all, and if you cry wherever two of us
are gathered, you will not be alone, we will listen with you
to the wailing in the wind of the mothers on the road making
the sounds of their babies after they stopped.
Our voices are what we raise because we have found no other
way yet, to call attention to those forever without them,
who died without ––
We were listening and the war was everywhere,
but so was the noise and it rose
a B-movie zombie
grabbing our necks.
Holding Patterns
We travel on the surface, in the expanse, weaving out imaginary structures and not filling up the voids of a science, but rather, as we go along, removing boxes that are too full so that in the end we can imagine infinite volumes. - Édouard Glissant
We baked bread and held the babies.
We remembered bread and babies,
sat in parked cars, shook our heads,
wondering about others behind glass,
shaking heads, and at those walking
in circles in the intersections, waving
arms to shout. We could not decipher
them yet
we looked often to the creatures nearby,
kept them close in our homes, in our cars,
in our beds we studied their movements
and tried to read their eyes and faces, we
gave food and names, followed them with
cameras, listened as to ciphers and kept
watch, as with oracles. They were judging
us, we knew. But how?
The children looked away and talked less,
and outside play we once took as birthright
became fraught as religion, history, and plans.
Everywhere you looked, there were images
over images, and they held us.
Most of what we did was wait and watch.
We’ll see, but it was a question. See? Maybe.
We watched the sky and bread, the ovens, and
the pets, watching us, and the children, there
was something we wanted to tell them. Wait,
we wanted to call to the children,
the right words. It was silent except
for the noise, which was everywhere,
like the next beginning about to erupt
from the holes of our mouths.
​
​
Baptism
We sang each other's names.
It burned our eyes
to look against the gas and
now was the time
for our tears. Machines
gnarled the earth and the flesh
of our flesh with metal
teeth and the bones sang
between them, refusing to be
swallowed again. Louder, we
said, louder now.
Flight Songs
We pulled the husks of cicadas from our ears
and the buried songs emerged from these
gestating skeletons, and in the end
we held them, dusting toward our lives.
Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth
––and we pulled the husks of cicadas from
our ears––and dies, so that the buried
songs emerged from our forthcoming
bones
unless we pulled the husks of our
songs from our ears as we died,
we could not sing, we could not fly
unless the buried songs emerged
from the dust of the husks of
our bodies, from the ashes of
our once and future wings.
​
​
​