When the Ghosts Come Ashore Read online

  open and tongue it off your bones?

  How soon afterwards did you fall off the bed

  and begin writhing on the carpet? Did this man

  stand over you watching your spasm?

  How quickly did your swimming arms wrap

  around his ankles? Remind you of an altar quaking

  beneath the weight of all that fresh sin?

  Did your arms wrapped around his ankles

  make you feel maybe like a sexy wet dream

  white boys tuck beneath their dicks?

  Did your arms wrapped around his ankles

  suddenly give the false idol a face and a neck

  that laughed at your lust?

  How quickly does this positioning betray?

  How quickly do his ankles betray? His grin

  betray? How black girl do you feel?

  How quickly does your back

  on the carpet scratch

  or soften your peeling spine?

  How soon does your flesh

  de-bone itself, does your black

  cough out its own teeth?

  NAT TURNER GOES VACATIONING IN D.C.

  The city is quiet and completely empty.

  Nat Turner takes his shoes off,

  walks down the middle of the road,

  and follows the yellow double line to the heart of the city.

  He presses his toes into the tar,

  tries to feel the blood pulsing below the surface.

  He follows the river downtown.

  He follows the river to the MLK memorial,

  applies his palms to the base.

  The stone feels cold, memory-less

  despite the carved quotes, blood-less

  despite the protruding body.

  He climbs to the top of the monument,

  leans into the sunset and raises his ax above his head,

  throws his shoulders down into the rock

  and chips the corner of King’s hand.

  He thinks it’s funny, that we took a rock

  and tried to pull a body out of it,

  called it honor, named it memory.

  He leans again, ax above his head, shoulders—

  and again, chips a bit of granite away.

  Again and again until Nat hollows out a hole.

  He squeezes the handle, kisses the metal,

  drops the ax into the chiseled spot.

  Hours later, the sun slowly rises.

  An outline of a black man with an ax

  spreads onto the grass.

  Nat turns his back on the monument.

  There is nothing in memory but a mouth-less shadow.

  He follows the river of blood back down the road,

  leaves the city-state full of stone

  and carved quotes, empty of bodies and memory,

  full of so many shadows and so many ghosts.

  HOW AMERICA LOVES CHICAGO’S GHOSTS MORE THAN THE PEOPLE STILL LIVING IN THE CITY

  an erasure of Chance The Rapper’s “Paranoia”

  Eyes been on the gun,

  on the dying,

  the shit neighborhood.

  They watch the paper,

  watch the hood boy militia

  trapped in the middle of the sun.

  Lips with a lotta murder talk.

  They probably scared of all the

  dark dark down here. Our nation,

  dry eyes, paranoia and a lotta dying,

  been pouring fireworks in the summer.

  I hear everybody’s god

  a little scared too.

  QUESTIONS FOR THE WOMAN I WAS LAST NIGHT, 3

  after Kush Thompson, after Warsan Shire

  How are you still unable to make

  your pelvis a bible? How do you become

  a glutton for pain and still blame

  the dinner plate for being full?

  How do you substitute addiction

  for addiction for giving up

  your history in shame’s mouth?

  How is your mouth a city lost

  beneath the sea and really just

  a wet grave at the same time?

  Is your mouth really just a mass

  burial for the burning sheets?

  Will the burning sheets

  become your body’s swaddling

  clothes, damp with moving flesh?

  Will you arise come morning?

  Do your hands push through

  the fabric like stretched skin?

  Do you fight it? Do you ever

  fight or does the smoke calm you?

  When you wake up smelling

  like a burnt house, melted plastic

  and appliances, do you

  tell yourself you will rebuild?

  CONJURING: A LESSON IN WORDS AND GHOSTS

  Our desks are in a circle in our classroom & it just so happens I’m sitting next to my white professor & all my black girl hair is flung over one shoulder & I can see everyone’s face & my professor, we’re talking about the 1920s & my professor, he says nigger & before that we were talking about Ralph Ellison & before that we were talking about Claude McKay & we skipped over Nella Larson & made fun of Gwendolyn a bit, but c’est la vie & my professor, he runs right through nigger like it’s not a wall my whole history is pinned up against & nigger sits in the middle of all of our desks & it’s like I’m the only one who can see it & everyone else in the room turns white even though they’re not; they’re pink & pale & sandy & tree-colored but still, everyone I mean everything turns white & I’m just a dot & I’m just a black girl with black girl hair & my black girl hips balanced in this dark red chair & we all know nigger is tree-colored & I can’t remember my face & my tongue bleeds right into my teeth & my mouth is full of spit & he didn’t mean it that way & this is academia & here comes the whole train of them, right? & don’t tell me I can’t say that word but you can & be mature / professional / quiet / good & freedom of speech & here they come & here’s the list of their freedoms they fight for but what about mine & I’m being honest, he really didn’t mean it that way & it’s just a word & my tongue & my teeth & language is such a complicated series of ropes and ladders & black folk be climbing and hanging at the same time & he only read it in context & it’s in the context of the reading & it’s in the reading & we all know nigger is tree-colored, which is to say, we all know nigger has black people hanging off the g’s, which is to say, some words carry ghosts no matter what because context & context is everything & my professor is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & is talking about & just like that, the whole room is haunted.

  HOW THE ATLANTIC OCEAN PREPARES FOR WAR

  The Atlantic is a map of bones.

  The Atlantic is a mouth of ancient boulders.

  The Atlantic is holding massacre

  like a keepsake against its heart.

  The Atlantic is painting the sunset in blood

  just above its receding hairline.

  The Atlantic is stuffing its pockets

  with photographs of children.

  The Atlantic is drunk on Motown.

  The Atlantic is drunk on jazz so black

  its blue because

  after things are black for a long time

  they become blue.

  The Atlantic has my jaw in its fist because my teeth

  and tongue have curled into knuckles.

  The Atlantic has Africa in its fist

  because they’ve been trading ghosts for centuries.

  The Atlantic has Haiti in its fist

  because the slaves had so much fight

  it filled up the moon;

  the moon moves everything.

  The Atlantic has fists where

  its knees should be.

  The Atlantic has fists where

  its shoulders curl into arms.

  The Atlantic has fists where

  its waist is supposed to bend.

  The Atlantic punches
everything,

  has fists where its eye sockets

  punch back at the gaping holes in the moon,

  collide, caress, call each other family.

  THE SPLIT ROCK PRAYS TO WHATEVER BROKE IT

  Rage is not to be avoided, diminished, belittled. Rage is God. Better believe my rage is seeped in love. – Shira Erlichman

  Let my anger be warm and ripe with love.

  Let it reek of car crashes that we have all survived.

  Let it breathe. Let it dance in my fists.

  Let it collapse drunk and merry

  across my knees, my bedspread.

  Let my anger be a thick, bubbling bath

  and the cool towel by the windowsill.

  Let my anger stretch into a generous wingspan.

  Let it be a split rock, a steady hammer,

  a plank of wood that still remembers the whole tree.

  Let it sweeten the milk, turn the mug steaming

  hot against the freezing chatter in my teeth.

  Let it be thick thick as a St. Louis summer.

  Let it be thick and just as full of memory

  and just as full of arched backs stretching the tired

  out of their spines, and just as full of black,

  and just as full of blues.

  Let my anger be the city of St. Louis, fresh-faced,

  looking in the mirror at all its pimples and stretch marks,

  looking at all its hard beauty that belongs to itself only,

  calling up Detroit, calling up Philly and all those cities saying,

  Baby, let’s all go dancing. Let’s roll our windows down and sing.

  Bring all your busted windows and overgrown lawns

  and new coffee shops we can’t afford and the schools

  closing or not and the naked empty lots and cellulite sidewalks

  and bring all your dead musicians and we’ll make a night of it.

  Let my anger be the celebration we were never

  supposed to have because we were never

  supposed to know we had anything

  worth celebrating.

  QUENTIN TARANTINO or WHY I DO NOT TRUST YOU WITH MY HISTORY or ON WEARING A GAUDY ROBE WHILE GRABBING THE ASS OF A NAKED BLACK WOMAN FOR A MAGAZINE

  I picture you mostly

  as an arrangement of limbs.

  You are the tenderest butcher.

  All of you is eyes upand-

  down-ing my frame.

  All of you is hands, knuckles

  pounding out a drumbeat.

  All of you is mining my throat

  for gold with your fingers.

  All of you fingerprints, birthmarks.

  All of you is fingers like stretch marks.

  Mama said keep your hands to yourself

  All of you dancing on broken back.

  All of you the biggest hands,

  say you just want to touch me.

  Mama said keep your hands

  All of you is eyelids and eyes.

  All of you is mouth

  kissing your nameplate

  in the nestled home between my breasts,

  licking the tree branch of my collarbone,

  tripping over the notches of each noose,

  drooling down the river of my spine.

  You are the tenderest butcher.

  Just want to squeeze me.

  Just want to touch it

  Mama said

  All of you is spit

  Mama said

  All of you tongue snake

  all the way around my throat.

  All of you thin pink wire lips,

  All of you such big hands

  touching everything,

  Mama said keep your hands

  All of you

  butcher

  stench

  think you own

  everything, think

  you own my

  everything.

  All of you

  grin

  laugh

  lean back

  cock your head

  suck your teeth

  toothpick my black

  pinky-finger-pick

  me out your

  mouth like a snapped neck bone

  be careful cuz

  Mama said

  I can still choke you

  All of you

  such big mouth,

  so many teeth.

  I always picture you

  bloated, freshly-feasted,

  your dinner plate,

  a gravestone,

  bones picked clean.

  THINGS I SHOULD SAY TO MYSELF IN THE MIRROR or THINGS I WOULD SAY TO THE CITY OF ST.LOUIS IF IT COULD HEAR ME

  I’ve been planning

  to leave you for years.

  It began as a quiet urging

  in the bottom of my heels

  and now I dream

  only of highways.

  My desk drawer

  opens to the smell

  of engine exhaust

  and the letter I wrote

  when I was nineteen

  and made my wrists

  a cave of plane tickets.

  It is a sign of prudent planning

  to have marked an escape route

  through your own bones.

  Once, after all the policemen

  left your forearm,

  I walked my eyes along

  the scar tissue on Delmar,

  pretending, casually,

  that I was your lover.

  I did it nearly every day

  for a whole summer

  until I couldn’t help

  but smell entirely of skin.

  Don’t be so hard

  on yourself. Half of you

  is postcard, while the other

  half of you is trying

  to rebuild what, years ago,

  was burned to the ground

  by someone else. You are

  always rebuilding. You are

  always reaching for the river.

  You have survived so much

  that no one remembers.

  And you still spread warm

  rain on all your overgrown

  lots. And you still get dressed

  in the morning. You still

  open wide for the sun.

  NAT TURNER FINDS OUT I’M CONSIDERING NOT GOING BACK TO SCHOOL TO FINISH MY UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE

  I’m at a table by the wall,

  hugging a small coffee with both hands.

  Nat walks into the nutmeg-filled shop,

  lays a wrinkled hand on my shoulder.

  I stand, breathless; we exit the diner together.

  Outside on the sidewalk, under the grey sky,

  I lean into his heavy shadow.

  I am drunk on the gravity of his bones.

  He holds my hand as we walk and instantly I am

  eleven years old. I want nothing more than to

  hear him speak. His lips, a mountain-range above

  his chin. We walk this way: two matches, one lit,

  down the street until we arrive at a cemetery.

  We walk to the center of the gated field. He presses his

  hand against my cheek. I feel no heartbeat

  but his skin is buzzing. The sky rolls into dusk.

  He slaps me. Hard. Surrounded in tombstones.

  Says first, “Some of us ain’t even got no rock.”

  My whole face is hot. He presses his hand against my

  cheek. I smell blood. I begin to cry. I’m so sorry.

  He touches my shoulder. He kisses my forehead.

  He drags his thumb under each eye, brushes away the water

  & the salt. The humid air leaves sweat above his eyebrows.

  I continue to cry. From my lip, I taste that I am leaking blood.

  Says second, “Our people know these two things best:

  water and salt. We cry when we run out of sweat,

  we sweat when we tired of cry.”

 
Nat, sweating. Me, cheek burning, still crying.

  Both of us, surrounded by rocks and ghosts.

  For an hour we stay gathered here, buried in fog.

  I stop crying. We make eye contact for the first time.

  Says last, “Good. You tired of cry. Now go back to school,

  and sweat.”

  BIPOLAR IS BORED AND RENAMES ITSELF

  I have recently come to the realization

  that I will be writing “the bipolar disorder poem”

  for the rest of my life.

  There are hundreds of ways

  to say I am wrapped in my own bees’ nest.

  or My body is a haunted

  house that I am lost in.

  There are no doors but there are knives

  and a hundred windows.

  or My body has apologized