We turned ourselves inside out like the word Alabama
I didn't realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is.
I see the lamb in there and my mamma's planet earth/ the soul, the land's whole alibi for gold and Lincoln and certain blacks can climb so high just for the chance to sit around sucking on ice with the ease of nightmares and neighborhoods
I who fetishize everything, even my own pride seen from the outside as eager reluctance or luck
or the clutter between brass and flags (it's been the greatest thing! as far as propaganda for our country, to send blacks over to europe to play Jazz), sound bitten and bleeding its aggregate of grips on the township, township.
I didn't realize until now how the Internet is full of photos of the open caskets of risen black heroes, from Billie Holiday to Emmett Till to Michael, and if you type in the happiest euphemism they beg reminiscence once a week on Sunday like the chubby newspaper full of nobody's business, I search for a song or a petty duet that might have been like Miles and Hendrix, so bored with my own obsessions they pretend to disappear into their opposites. The imaginative voyeur begins to accumulate evanescent events that no tangible reality can reverse or deny and I wonder how many memories are willfully trapped in creases like these, pressed against the stained glass window of a church right at the nape of some saint's skirt while a room full of orphans trade weightless information like fugitives.
