Past Life Regression/Rebirth

The ruby in the center of the room was another me speaking in genderless tongues, ruminants, peeling the hunted entrance off complicity and with its rind turning the silence elegiac-wide. I had my own room in Iowa. Four years old, I had this one tribunal of my own where I went to meditate and make chimes of the bars of light that the blinds made on wall with moon and siren. I don’t understand where fear was but it never reached me inside the violence of home I felt like an anchor and chord and a record and a miracle, I felt saved already, I felt safe because my parents were a little crazy like in the movies and the unhinged are honest and always looking for evidence of their safety or of the bounty waiting on the other side for when they regain composure. I am the bounty in that house, the evidence, the child prize appraised as obedient, pretty, be easy, I am the other side. My sorcery is— be a miracle and say no with your body. The throat closed and third eye readied sustenance, I ate my dreams. They tasted like blood and denim. I drank my blood. It was the cool mud of ancient Minnesota. In this one most memorable feeding dream, maybe I was abducted. I traveled beyond the horizon separating event from event, that lying line of blue, that aqua whimper against the onslaught of truth. Either way I went to sleep, mama tucked me in, everything was patient. And I woke up, arms in an x over my chest, in a headband of shells and feathers and a leather dress, bison and lines of orange paint on my cheekbones, like I’d been sent back to see who I’d been in a past life. A girl, peaceful in battle, a swarm of heroic indifference to struggle, a matter of fact nihilistic hero. I was shown some past life self and also joined with her as sigil, healer, letter of sky in the bled out genocidal reel. Being reborn, I got up, walked across the hallway to my parents’ room to check on them like a spy. They were ok, quiet. I went back to bed and contemplated the familiar unknown of rebirth. I was four, I’d never seen a picture of an indigenous girl in the soil waiting to be consecrated, but I knew her, like I know myself. How could I speak about my trip to the end of hunger? There’s never been a more complete and urgent sense of peace on the killing floor. There’s no road as unspeakable as a child who still remembers her previous lives, caught between every tongue, their rumbling significance, their appetite for reunion with the now. What saved me in that house was the spirit remembered in flesh that neverending night/now. Escaping the distress of logic is what saves me.

Requiem for Mamie Till

On the edge   of duress     this pressured   ecstasy of leaping   let the people see    what I see  

     there  is something   already too   symmetrical like   angels in Emmett's       manner some nerve in his    eyes as crisp as September roads   some road in him as smooth       as it smothers the crooked attitude of   those who beg to touch it the flickering   acquisition of that shine his perfect pearl lips  and shimmering teeth we go blind when he’s happy     and she is prone to shimmering with him and all   the men wear big black hats to her daggers to her      eagles to her solomon’s leap and they are prone  

                                                                                                                to shimmering   with her    

  Revenge as  endless and    unwedded as love     we made needles in   the skulls of evil men     and then left them   to their entropy thinking     

         they  got   away with    something swoop   kissing at the verdict   like the frozen corpses of  Pompeii Mississippi they really   did this kissing / killing filled  their DNA with needles you have to   laugh at their ugliness you have     let the whistle echo in them like an itch to  dissolve all will but repentance            

Mamie  will never  be the same   

She can see daylight   on the other side       it has a hidden name      

Let the people  see what she sees