Carpe Omnia (For Lucinda, Ida Mae and the Rest of Us)

Old hands and old lands;
They have known my name.
Women in skirts wide and clanking like church bells,
Braced over tin basins, shucking corn and cleaning yams in the sun.
Old tasks spoken in old words
On African shores
On plantations
In the backyard of the house that I was raised in.
Old hands and old lands;
They have called my name.

Sweat rolls steadily down her knit brows,
Like brooks over pebbles.
Her face in photographs was as stern as a mountain.
She told my grandmother that Kentucky comes from the Iroquois "Ken-tah-ten"
 

Bare foot Ida Mae taps me on shoulders in my dreams.
 

I wake up with words wet on my lips, spitting out salmon fat with eggs.
"Ken-tah-ten"
Land of tomorrow.

She calls to me, leaving trails for me to follow in red Kentucky dirt.

Land of tomorrow.
 

I am the unfinished pages of my mother's journal.
I am the high school diploma that was denied my great-grandmother.
I am her unacknowledged good grades, and the tests she had to take over and over again to prove she wasn't cheating.
I am the rightful place she was denied in the Latin Club.
I am the stolen quills for the sixty-five million and more whose names have been lost, abandoned, or taken.
I am the ink well that illiterate hands dipped found Cardinal feathers into, knowing without having to be told that words are freedom and wordlessness makes you chattel for white men.
I am yellowed and wrinkled pages of torn bible passages, slipped from calloused hand after calloused hand at midnight in reeds.
I am the screaming baby stolen moments after birth, dream-suckling for his mother.
I am the good teeth, strong back, clear eyes and naked childbearing hips that fetched a good prize at the state fair.



My blood is hot sweat and pork grease and work songs.
My bones are a mortar and pestle to grind corn meal for frying.
My tongue moves quick like freshly unrecognizable feet covered in leeches from days of running in marshes.
My voice was made in dirt floor cabins, by hands dirty with pollen and pricked with thorns from cotton plants, rubbing balms and salves on the backs of children with scars caked thick and misshapen as mud pies on a playground.
My ribs are shoebox guitars played on matchstick porches, holding a heart that is not just my heart, my many hearts beating throaty voices of gospel choirs.

There is always the faintest taste of iron in the back of my throat. Blood and rust tickle my sinuses; I wake in the night smelling smoke. At first, I do not know whether the house has burned down. Then the stench of charred bodies, the burned strange fruit like Cain's rejected sacrafice.


Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow. "Louder" she commands like an approaching siren.
"Scream. Scream like a train whistle, baby girl. Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow."
"Shout it like hallelujahs at dawn" she says. "Shout it from can-see to can't-see."
Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow. Land of tomorrow.

Mixing mud and water from dirty rivers,
I mould new mouths.
Mouths with teeth bared
Maybe grinning, maybe growling, maybe both at once, but always open.
When you deny me, it is with this mouth I speak.
Mouths red with lipstick, swollen and pursed lips
Having been beaten, or having been kissed.
Mouths full of rage sizzling like hot oil in cast iron pans, bruised and missing teeth.
When they bash me and the ones I love, I spit burning blood into the sky, raining acid stars upon their up turned, confused faces.
 

By the time you have seen this, it will be too late. I will eat you alive, I am not afraid to be a monster.

I dare you to forget what I have done in their names.

For Beloveds Everywhere

My friends and lovers, we don't cry the way mother's mothers used to cry.

These women used to cry whole mud rivers made of
swollen mounds of flesh, more hematoma than breast
full of lactated milk undrank,
babies spared from slavery and genocide.
Mothers' rivers full of broken bones,
effigies of the old gods and goddesses torn up by their clay roots
deforested and shoved into makeshift dustpan corners
old names buried in the wagging tongues of the colonizers.
Tears that do not stay locked in the lachrymal glands, like patient bullets in loaded rifles.
Tears that go down as smooth as battery acid, waiting to be unearthed from the ribs,
great fossils of past hurts.
The spindly bird-bones of memory.
A wise mestiza once said to me,
"Not every song we sing has to be a song of triumph. Some songs will be of sorrow, of failure."
Sealing away our longings and hurt, lungs esophagus and pitiless stomachs made reservoirs of inky waters black and bursting,
Our bodies sweet and swollen blood oranges, leaking and weeping like fresh tattoos.

The hope to cry out loud, more than mothers and mother's mothers quivering eyes could have prayed for us when they looked down on us in heavy arms, only babies swaddled in tissue paper hope.
My friends and lovers, we can cry hallejuahs-worth of big, outspoken, wailing entitled tears.
We don't have to die secret deaths anymore,
carrying suitcases full of ash to our own burial grounds.
Your statistics will speak, no longer a plot point, a simple of unit of data,
voices as fleshy and proud and wounded as the bodies that hold them.
No more silently ticked charcoal tally-marks on the heart's walls.

This poem is for every woman
who doesn't get to stay home, windows drawn,
hoping to unname themselves when the faint grey whispers of men whose names they knew and didn't know creep onto their bodies
leaving a ripe stink like sulfur.

This is for every woman that doesn't want to.
This is for the ones with tender eyes like horses, the ones who are able to smell lightening and try to warn you, shooting clay arrows to get your attention before it is too late.
This is for the ones whose quivers are always full, the ones who are making and making and making arrows. This is not a metaphor. This is a warning.

To Ethel (draft 1)

Finally, it is storming like Seattle should, and I can move again. As if the raindrops and I are playing freeze tag, and just to be a tease, the storm clouds waited and tapped a toe, giggling as I sat crouched with a pen over a page, waiting for my heart's ink to come out. Here we go. This poem is a response to my beautiful and talented friend Sidony's piece "To Lucille," about her friendships with women.

To Ethel.
I stink. I know I stink because I just smoked a cigarette or five, neither of us have showered in days, we ate burritos at 3am, I'm wearing amber oil on all my pulse points, and I am thinking of that time we fried kimchi in my kitchen when there was nothing else to eat. The odor of my memory is pungent and wafts through my room, all up and down the weathered staircase that looks like it's made of driftwood, following us out the front door as we bundle up (probably much more than we need to) to go get coffee in the flat, grey sunlight. We walk down the street in hats and scarves and legwarmers and tights with geometric designs and sweaters that would make Cosby blush, looking over our shoulders to make sure the white men are looking as we rail against white male privilege. We needn't have worries; of course they are. We are a walking, snarling piece of free form jazz. And in this American northwestern city no-one even thinks twice about looking at the two black girls on the street that look like a moving Picasso.

I wish they all could be California girls.
Ethel, do you remember the day we learned together, in the house that you were raised in, what eyeliner is for (not for making the eyes look larger, but for drawing designs on our faces)? How about that time you cut my god-awful perm off, disembodied strands of hair that looked and felt like they came from a wig on your pink tile floor, leaving only tight, soft ringlets resting lazily on my scalp, and the first step on my path to getting free. The up-all-night reckonings with our brilliance, and how they didn't even realize what we had memorized and learned with our bodies when we were ten years old and younger. How could they possibly be so behind, and we were the ones that needed catch up? We made up languages that simplified even the most abstract concepts into one or two words and knowing glances, and taught one another how to read tarot cards. Remember that one time, when that one white girl said "Bob Dylan is the voice of the revolution," and we both cackled in her face and told her what was up: "Hell no girl, Chuck D is the voice of the fucking revolution" I'm realizing now that we even got that one wrong. Our brown mouths, crinkled into smiles with the faintest of unapologetic hair on the upper lip and glimmering teeth, these hold the voice of any revolution. Because all we have to do is say "I'm alive and I'm taking what's mine" and they'll be quaking in their britches.

God only knows what I'd be without you.
The truth is, you were always the brilliant one of the two of us. By the time I'd met you at eighteen, you already had an intimate knowledge of how to take care of yourself using what you found on the ground in an alley and to fight like a dog for the things that you loved and believed in. You told me about books I had never heard of, moved with me to syncopated rhythms, spat rhymes in my face and encouraged me to spit them right back out. We played dress up in your grandmother's scarves and held photo shoots and philosophical summits in your uncle's living room. Our experienced fingertips moving through record after record and brown-leaved books with dog-eared pages, always hungry for the next thing that we could add to the pastiche we created for our personal viewing pleasure.

We'll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the t-bird away.
Eventually it came time for you to pack up and move back home, because you ran out of money and we both ran out of ideas. A slow-motion punch to the jaw, and suddenly you're gone. Now it's all wilted songs sung from a balcony choked with creeping ivy. For California in December, for another Sagittarius, for knowing it's you from behind by the drawings on your sneakers. We reconvene occasionally now, and it's like it always was: you show me the miracles of putting raw honey in our kinky ass hair, give me a Moleskine notebook; I feed you brown rice and kale cooked in ume plum vinegar, and paint your toenails a color named "Lickity-Split Lime." But there is no more turning around and knowing exactly where you were by the smell of sandalwood and dirt; I, like a lame bloodhound, can't pick up the scent anymore.

Invincible Skin

The following poem is one of the first things I wrote when I decided to take my writing seriously enough to do things like edit, make a concerted effort to study the works of other poets I respect and admire, and, God forbid, publish and perform. This is probably it's fourth or fifth draft since its existence. In some ways, this poem has been my touchstone the last year or so, hence the blog title.

Come here.
A little bit closer, and I'll tell you a secret.
I have always wanted teeth like stars
and invincible skin.
Fingertips ridged as old seashells, caress scars
moles, razor burn, ingrown pubic hair, picked-at dead skin on my cuticles.
These are shackles, reminders of my time-sensitive packaging.
Muscles taught, anticipating pain
still hold ready,
still
hold
ready.

This is my palimpsest.

Recall the marks.
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
sound like
Force
Clamp
Prod
Dissect

Cut
to guilty bones and quaking hands from too much caffeine and too few calories.
Survivalism.
***
Survivialism: the urgent act of saving yourself using the bluntest tools made of the crudest materials.
Nightmares haunt my body, dark, thick and expansive as Conrad's Africa. I am tied and nailed down by Lilliputian white men, rope braided thick and rough, taught over my breasts, stomach and hips. It burns, digging like graves into my skin. A flag is stuck into my navel and I am claimed. Suddenly they are wearing bibs and bring out forks and knives. Talk about eating the Other.

This is my palimpsest.
Ghosts hanging round my neck, sometimes it's too damn hard to move like this.
These histories we carry with our skins, in our skins, make them thicker.
And I am learning sooner rather than later that this thickness?
This thickness just makes me feel heavy.
Did you know that a suit of armor weighs 55 pounds? No matter how much I weigh that's still going to be more than half of me.

So I ask you now.
Please, let my body be mine.
Not a force to be reckoned with,
Not a reminder of home you never had, 
Not a placeholder at parties and meetings for your high-minded radicalism,Not a symbol of my strength in the face of heteropatriarchialwhitesuprimacist society,
Not a symbol of my failures to be a blushing white lily,
Not a symbol of anything.
Let it be mine and let it be soon,
because I tell you this, Silence eats me when I am starving.
I have felt his dank breath on my shirt collar,
have seen his fangs covered in the blood of other little black girls.
Mama Audre always told me that Silence is death.
Let our bodies go, because soon there will be none of us left.
And if our bodies are not reason enough, remember that we are the appetizer; his appetite is insatiable.
He will most certainly be licking his lips,
looking around and wondering,
"What's for dinner?"

walking home

Today I had I really great conversation with the mama of the baby I watch for work. She's writing her dissertation on representations of black female sexuality in cinema.

She provided for me, without having realized it, or at least not letting me in on it if she did, something I've been greatly needing lately, and that's a sense of direction and a pair of open arms.

Sometimes I wonder if the easier path would be better for me over all. I mostly just wonder that when I look at people I used to know. So many of them are living these lives that are, to some degree really appealing, if only for their comfort level. To be the prototypical upwardly-mobile black girl at college, with not a hair out of place or ever letting one's leg hair get long enough to notice, it'd be a lot easier in someways. To force down the parts of me that don't line up with convention, or to ignore the things that I think about, the ones that keep me up at night because they're burning for a voice. I give those things voice, because I've never been able not to notice them. I just got a vocabulary for the voice to speak with in the last couple of years. But when I didn't know the words it was so much easier to keep it quiet.

I wonder if all of the projects, both internal and external, are even worth it. I wonder frankly if I just try to do these things because I can see holes, and wiring, and marionette strings, but can't quite figure out how to make it stop, this system that I see ruining everyone that I love. So I do what I can, in the name of exposing the gears and churning cranks, but maybe I only do it so I can sleep at night.

bell hooks has this bit in "Yearning" where she talks about black folks who are at the margins not only of mainstream white consciousness, but mainstream black consciousness. Those who are committed to explicitly anti-capitalist projects, and don't equate black self-actualization with black capitalism, and are not afraid of losing their "blackness" by consuming all types of cultures. She brings in this awesome quote by Paulo Friere (that I'm gonna butcher) that says that we can begin as objects to then reenter as subjects. All of these projects are an attempt to steak out subjectivity in a culture and society that writes me out as the object, essentially by definition.