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  

Maafa’s Equipment

What  is the  black body   when setting  up floating fences      when I moved and noticed    the dead lemons pentagrams   for love rotten     rubber yellow like a low rain and   it glows as the ghost of a dead   sun it’s roads unzipped to show devils     we love forever honeycomb low veil will you   come home and wave slowly Will you roam   to me with wax and memes clean my delirium and   I get hungry punch the dirt like hunting and swallow   something country bounty slips down me like leaky snow holds  in me a calm knowing when the land will change hands     it will already be a ruins I rinse my mouth in blood     I love the bite marks of tractors on earth but I wouldn’t wanna    be her        

Infant Energy/ Infinity

This time traveling beyond language was a survival   vigil hold mechanism  at   bay but     also the chance  in it the chant  me(chan) summon this   time all of your agency     at infancy you fancy this  time almonds and the crease in the   air on the altar cowards whispering   their prayers at babies we say resurrection  this way and some are shamed into surrender   and some coerced and some just don’t remember the song    of themselves come back to learn it over anterior return   retinue it burns in the new bodies of stars of cannibal  roses     

And   the the titled  heave of any    ultrasound meme       is getting around like     a rumor and rummaging through the   sun’s belongings I don’t   see so much of a difference   between ownership and hysteria     I don’t see these things as different   things and my sense of pleasure is in cherishing     the perverse unity of speechlessness and forever this   way the way the womb does hug its phantoms     in tom toms and Rosecrans / normandie not the one    in France not to outlaw digression but to long for the line of     sight from purchase to loss of will and let it recoil: a healing     

Reenactment

There can be tenderness        in the cedar wrapped satin    instrument of torture I beat with   a hammer until it believes it is really     a foot & my bloody feet look good in   the field like how they would appear in      leaving the slender green gashes make an alphabet      of  that    way  over there!    scatological   departure with         an objective so clear     and coiled its    

modesty     will make you   weep      

The modesty   of a Black  pianist because   it is not sublimated     rage makes me     weep     

that    pathological       tenderness of     this and this   and this black body        bleeding nods and curses       seeps into the dirt as render then     whatever murder silence is       

His           immersive sincerity         his endless childhood         a rubric for the silly hope     we all keep in our skin       like buckets of candy and the    sugar never expires but its sweet fades       to the faint funk of daylight in a movie            

         What a  terrible    way to keep     a record