Black Spring: Ceiling Fan Scream

It’s Juneteenth     the paper plane landed  on the fan blade and scratched  the air for hours, what balance between confession and surrendor! The tiger  or the clown is cringing and I’m  never again contemplating Moby Dick the  ocean goes to the soda crackers and sharks, all  our roads are rivers. I want it to mean evolution but   there’s something chemical about the spinning plateau and   did I kill him or row him to shore I do not know    I just don’t know What I’m sure of: there’s nothing more upsetting than   a dark room lit by the aquamarine glow of a flickering television   there’s nothing I dread more that too much accountability in black  America just let us be evil-valuable my picture is on the evening news but    with a straight perm wig, snatched, and freckles jammed onto my cheekbones with  brown eyeliner they’re calling it a manhunt I laugh and the room goes dark   with my innocence and the spirits are a sway of pitchers playing catch in a cornfield  the slap of leather on leather a drum he’s over there mosquito on a street lamp            begging please will I clap him into smithereens and watch some housewives meet for cocktails to take the  edge off

Black Spring : When

The clock is not time, fool. And they sing their pathologies like oaths, though obedience is not virtue. Haven’t we obeyed the evil beyond saving for long enough, chased the devil’s leaf and called arriving luck. A volta this season. A whole double-blind nearing. She is a genius. He is a witch. What if. And it is so. Adjusted. We all had to. A man is not a clock, love. Had to clock him and run, tuff. But somehow in the photograph I was one with black eyes. Now I understand the meaning of childhood. And the difference between compassion and the imagination. When I think of that girl, me, she vanquishes everyone and feels no pain, I cannot imagine pain toward her, only the dance of it, the soft wince, the body making its muted mouth shape and then limp retaliation before regenerative collapse. But when I lend her compassion, the same girl, I see the bloody grill and black eyes blooming purple as she swings at the mostors of paradise, amethyst knuckles, brash smile,  laughing at them for being as stiff as minute hands in the hour of parting, teasing them for feeling valid in their former dominance, whatchu thought this was,  loving them for their impotence without it, the machine I mean, the state, she struts to their broken fate in naked lace and suede, just cause I don’t eat it, doesn’t mean I won’t kill it if it steps to me rough and wilting    adorn its resting place in the stage of poplar from which  we became so popular for turning new colors into sorrel and  song and counting the days by how large a batch we we made from light   to light I swung like xanax , landed on the eighth note of    tomorrow: time travel as easy as doing what you came to do  when you came to do it which is always now     

Excerpts from the Firebird/ In search of black spring

Photographs of black women standing alone in nature, or the polluted centers of parking garages, or the pristine gottied feeling of roman arches, or in egypt or wherever black women are sold, are beginning to give me obscene pleasure, as if we’re safest in those tropical solos of the calloused heel seeping out our gazes in relaxed with-teeth smiles. Calm down, sorrow. And when I climb my shallow hill first thing in the morning and stand alone before the arbor of stinging beetles, a silent sacrifice, eternal, I feel safer in the practical burst of wind and abandonment, my choice this time,  than in any man’s arms, safer than I’ve ever been from the swarm. So safe I could scream and he’d be born.

Inaction is brutality

When the slanted cape of an oasis of gurus trapped in the desert  sets up its kite of suitors are you ready to fly ‘way home?

Teddy Perkins as a Girl

I don’t remember why exactly, I was on a killing spree, why I shot him the back after telling him to run. When someone gives me flowers I keep them until they turn into dust, I half-whispered, and nudged the trigger like a friend I hoped would stay for one last drink. Hope is crazier than revenge, but braver. Bravery is feminine revenge, I chanted, as I shot the last minstrel and left him in Bel-Air as bait and baby daddy. Sun Ra’s  I’ll Wait for You was playing its dazed romance of omens blinking in a rhythm with the shepherd of shadows our bodies danced against the wall. Outside it was 73 degrees and an easy low yellow, the frown of the palm-clowns melting into whistle. It started as self-defense, the planter who called himself massah had forced himself on me so many times I finally snapped and took him out. It was so sad and so satisfying and then I had the whole house to myself and no one left to blame so I started a small band of former slaves, music men, but they all wanted the same thing, fame and fortune, me for a mistress and a doomed mother, and to dance on big stages for all their former massahs and call that revenge, healing, integration. And every time they got what they wanted they’d come back drunk and high and with a group of white women and forget how the play the blues and forget how to improvise. Only the blind black men survived   American promise. As black women, we had to disguise our near constant rescue mission as small daily acts shaking that ass, moaning, wearing khaki and sequins, making the kitchen smell like forgiveness. This freedom shit was more and more of a menace, our men were turning into broken children and we were becoming angry gods. I’d been trained as a classical ballerina as part of the perks of my role as massah’s sometime-muse, but it was more like the men in the band wanted me to spread across the instrument naked while they stomped out the spiders of their minds and I was one, underfoot, they never asked me to play, never ask what the confederate ghosts told me about the stark noteless hymns of their rallies. Lately, the broad edge silly smiles of the ones who come home at dawn looking for grits and asking me to grease their scalps, don’t seem like the mercy of surprises they used to be. And the Julius Eastman refrain came true, I am playing all of these niggas. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for love.