 Mathematics In which I try reducing you to numbers: I. Nothing is complete until I’ve shared it with you. II. Two chocolate bars melting in the back seat. Two teacups from the shelf, too high to reach. III. The scarring on your chest. IV. Studies suggest this could be the hottest year on record since 1880. And as we age, the ground may come to a boil, burning the flight from our feet. Still, I think: how lucky are we to pilot the same combusting star? V. The feather-touch of fingers in dawnlight. Handspeak To the man in my poetry class, I was talking with a friend, reflecting on the pristine pages of her portfolio. I gushed over the unconditional love radiating from her stanzas. Her poetry made me feel safe, warm, and all fuzzy in my Feeling Cabinet(™). I was excitable, talking too fast. All you saw were my hands. You limped up beside us and reached right into our conversation. You curled your white fingers around the slimness in my wrist like the cold, bony cuffs of convention. You held firm, putting an end to the error I didn’t even realize I made: “Okay,” you said, “Now talk.” I talk with my hands. It’s one of those ADHD things I can’t really control about myself, like bouncing my leg, forgetting my own name, or tuning out tired poems about the socially divisive evils of millenial technology. My hands are so constantly in motion, I barely notice their punctuating posture when I speak. My hands are mediums, possessed by festive ghosts who have made it their undying duty in this mortal coil to turn my social life into a one-man puppet show. Only, you thought this show needed one man more. I realise now, in this late hour, you were right. THANK YOU for inserting yourself into my conversation. Before you so boldly jumped in to save the day, I only had ten fingers, an other woman, and my train of ---umm like, thought to keep me on track. THANK YOU for taking on this task when you saw my hands twisting and turning through the tides of turbulence. You’ve been doing this a lot longer than me, which obviously makes you the authority on how a moderately attractive young lady ought to conduct her own body in a precariously prestigious setting such as Glendale Community College. Where would I even be without #OldWhiteMen to educate me? Granting me permission to speak, stifling all the egregrious gestures that make a girl unique? Silly me. Silly millenial with my silly smartphone and silly Handspeak. To the man in my poetry class: Thank you for reminding me. I’m sorry. I forgot. Forgot my place, Forgot my thought. These hands are far too loud to be anything but silly. Aren’t you glad you caught me so you could set me free? What could a silly girl like me ever be without a man around every corner to take her wrists and lead? Sweetie are you a boy or a girl? d’you prefer pink or blue? you don’t want to turn out gay do you? sweetie, what if somebody tries to hurt you? come on, please? can’t you pose pretty for me? can’t you tuck your teeth together and smile, smile, smile so sweet you split at the seams? can’t you spare us the responsibility of “he” and “she?” can’t you pick one and make it easy for me? are you a boy or a girl? what’s with that face? d’you have something to say? what can I do to make you feel safe? and by the way, is it okay if I use your dead name, I mean, your birth name? just for today, just while they can see, just in front of The Family. they’re going to ask, so please forgive me: are you a boy, or a girl? how does it feel to be different? when did you choose to be different? why do you always need to act so different? who did this to you; where did he go? what did he touch to make you different? oh. is that it, sweetie? are you still dangling from a sick man’s string? is he the thing you’re digging out of your head? is he at the end of every wire cut red? then answer me this: are you the girl he hurt or the boy he created? with the best of intention, I ask: sweetie, are you his victim or his invention? are you a boy, or a girl? are you my daughter, or are you dead? are you some kind of confused, or just sick in the head? are you sure this is you? are you doing okay? is there a pill you can take to make this go away? to make you feel better so we can get through the day without confronting this thing? this “gender neutral” thing this “transgender” thing this confusing and delicate and sensitive thing. this thing dripping out of your eyes and between your thighs. sweetie is it asking too much for you to be happy? God gave you that body. is that not reason enough to be happy? © Jamie Lee Heath
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Grief Work* 1) After your bacchanal brother, you kiss the slick forehead of the muscleless rind you once loved. 2) The thick Hennessey once betrothed to your brother’s coal lips smolders the hearth of your throat. It was either that or the pungent taste of embalming fluid. How it settles into the skin, undoes fallen flesh fresh, the beloved’s carcass a plum plump with its coral steel, the beauteous fruit profuse in its bounty, ripe with the vitric lye, the husk of him an unwavering gray & the transient taste of mortality that true love’s kiss won’t awaken when the black body becomes slack. 3) You attempt to quantify your grief. 4) He filled your phlegm with asterisks. 5) The crescent scar on his left hand? *After Natalie Diaz / After Franny Choi His Moon Was a Straitjacket, a Big White Pill in the Sky & his mother’s corazón was an asilo soon after he broke. He slumbered there. Scabrous assassin, that he was. Savage dragon whom Beowulf slew. Crickets would fidget in the fluorescent dusk as we—(the townspeople)—gathered to see what the fuss was. Was it seething sanity that caused us to look upon the elusive fugitive with chagrin, or the pallid deaths of a thousand nights which caused us to bind our minds? He was our own trapecio who balanced on the backs of cricket cadavers, their pequeñas tripas festooned the floor like Frida’s roots. It was late April when we watched him unfold like the throat of Gehennah to devour us. Abundantes infieles. Cosecha de traidores. The night we admitted him, his sky was an oil slick gown of confusion. His official diagnosis was psychosis when he returned to us lucid & luminous like Gabriel’s annunciation. I touched the slender shoulder of his holy ghost as if to say: I’m sorry there was no wake for the death of your brain, that rotting waste -land deteriorating into chemically imbalanced absconds no man can trek without a canteen of sanity. Crickets twisted their little laments into the tapestry of night, shucking small songs under the waxen trance of moonlight. The day his lunacy went into hibernaculum we all celebrated, but what was the point? There was no more village to burn to cinder anyhow. Report on a Landscape with [ ]’s Psychotic Break Inside or Scene Between Mi Primo y La Luna Cerebral cemetery Axis of asymmetry Pseudo-alive psyche Rorschach’s quandary Quasi-contortionist botany Knuckles bloomed To oleander doom Caesuras like wrists Trysts of flesh and bone The torso a brown taffeta gown The skin split into sonetos Each sinew a volta The secret of syllables The pyre of pentecost The tensing of tongues The voguing of Vulgate The servitude of Salomé Matins’ bread of days Vespers’ meat of nights Manic meads of in between Pallid puppeteering Altogether moon muddled The dissipation of luna moths Ascetic apparition Aesthetic and ascension Calvary and cutlery he is Barbed diadem reduced To cranial coronet of sorrow Still Life with Human Immunodeficiency Virus Mississippi girl is the first child to be “functionally cured” of HIV, researchers announced Sunday. --Saundra Young, CNN, Mar. 4, 2013 Mississippi baby scientists thought was “functionally cured” of HIV now has detectable levels of the virus in her blood, her doctors say. --Saundra Young and Jacque Wilson, CNN, Jul. 11, 2014 Its precious blood is poured everywhere - soothing, healing, saving. —St. Benedicta of the Cross Music forces its eyes shut. At the reprise of a lullaby, the hearth of her chaste throat opens only to be formicated by a swarm of sloe, scorching locusts: the small sodomites perish in the seventh circle of her guttural hell. In a dream, she sucks her thumb & blood doesn’t trickle out like merlot, chafed notes dripping from a red mandolin. In lieu, a god’s knot of ichor floods her mouth. Phantom cellos in lab coats won’t climax to the dirge of her cries tonight. Black diatribes won’t leap from their lips like an achromic doe into a thicket of flickering thorns. ***Jabari Jawan (he/him/his) is a black Xian man, poet, performer and teaching-artist from Chicago, IL. He loves God, Baldwin, Talenti's sea salt caramel gelato and his mama. He currently lives in Phoenix, AZ where he often serves as a consulting teaching-artist and workshop facilitator for Black Poet Ventures. His poems are forthcoming from The Shade Journal and Vinyl Poetry. You can follow him on Twitter @thedarktrapeze. |
Kimberly WilliamsKimberly has been fortunate to travel to half the Spanish-speaking countries in the world by the time she was forty. As a traveler into different cultures, she has learned to listen ask questions, and seek points of connections. This page is meant to offer different points of connections between writers, words, ideas, languages, and imaginations. Thank you for visiting. Archives
October 2020
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