Jabari Jawan

                                                                           KEY
​

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.