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.

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?"