a man dissolved.

Ghost puffs of cotton flutter next to these old plantation mansions with their overseeing verandas that wrap around and beyond my sight out here in the white, the old South, which may be more black than it will ever admit. There is the indelible print from a heavy boot heel; the smell is leather and dirt and blood, steeping my skin like sun-ripening sweet tea. I see a rope weeping from a peach tree on this slow saunter down main street Appalachee. Every scene is a mess of nostalgia and Southern comfort, of folk and soul, simplicity and rhythm; yet also sorrow and bitterness, racism and hate, pain and fear, clay and blood. Suddenly these beautiful fields become impassable sorrows, no longer thriving with life but full of life absorbed, stolen. Lives, landscapes, and memories are very differently colored.

This is the geography of our little ol’ Georgia, our jazz-and-bluegrass Georgia, our yes’m-yessir Georgia, our collards-and-watermelon Georgia; our ten-lashes-to-twenty-five-to-life-for-negritude Georgia, our ‘whites-only’ Georgia, our peach-trees-planted-and-Peachtrees-paved-by-black-hands Georgia; our dirty-sweet, scary-beautiful, Harley-riding, coupe De’Ville driving, plantation-owning, project-thuggin, hootin’-and-hollerin’, hotter-than-two-hells, perfect-piece-of-shit Georgia.

It is part of our everyday experience of being here, and you think we do not know? Our terrain is bodied by history’s slow-moving ghosts, and we pass through them with a tired grimace. We confront, we confront, we know, we know. We learn to know we cannot escape. This is the substance of humidity that swells our bodies and buildings, our pores, mortar, and joints with a gristly slip. It is the red in the clay, the kudzu taking over. We must try hard to fight and accept, to love and regret: to pare away, but not remove it from the landscape. It must remain always in view like the threat of unsweet tea. It will always define something about this place and we must know that. It is a troubling visuality, a schizophrenic horizon, a series of mixed metaphors, and yet, everyday, part of our living.

“We need to radically challenge the notion that we don’t have an obligation to care for one another”

This was the moment when everything changed for me, those words released from a chasm deeper than the black in her braids. Now things are rushing out, things are opening up from the deepblack. Our hands on the pulsing, sunwarm shoulder of a silver stallion poised to run…

it’s a tendency, we have a tendency of working our tendons into carefully manipulated contortions constituting our routinized, regulated borders. we embody only borders, are given only a hair’s breadth of being, a violent narrowness in which to perform.

muscle memory. to performances we are bound, sinews that come between the impulse to embody and the embodiment are tensile, fibrous, wound through and around like fingers on our being. flexion, tension, flexion, tension, tension, tension, tension. muscle memory is beyond blood and betwixt flesh. separating flexion from tension is an imprecise contraction, a mere minor fluctuation, a subtle skin ripple, a velvet beat of a butterfly’s wings. it takes only the slightest of movements, and sometimes less than that, for some thing to become something else— realizing this is enough to inspire a dissenting opinion of our apparent rigidity.

with a beautiful pirouette we may just slip away and untangle from flesh, blood, and memory; take a silent cue and separate, dissipate, fluctuate. we must begin to fail to inhabit ourselves in order to cultivate new proclivities for being, to turn strangling sinuousness into an immeasurable tenuosness. can you dance on a hair’s breadth?

intimacies are ripening into frailty, passions are weathering threadbare, fall is drawing him away again. driving the moving truck, he begins blinking like a waiting cursor on a white page…something is stirring. something internal, perhaps imaginary, dies everyday under his skin; some performance fails with a quickly closing curtain. the velvet is cutting. he’s thinking: do you remember when you thought you were beautiful? when you felt beautiful for the first time? you began becoming after that pitch black bathroom almost caved you in, remember? you came out of there with your feet on the fucking coldest concrete in a basement that was in the middle of everyone else’s nowhere. remember how hard you couldn’t cry? how hard you gripped that countertop it merged with the bones of your palms? you knew nothing and noone. was it resolve that let you sleep on the driveway? you woke freezing and beaded with dew but the sky was glass and reachable. you were becoming beautiful and it hurt. 

now that he’s been, it hurts even more. 

 you tell us

daughters.

mothers,

you tell us,

lovers.

you tell us

secrets, voicelessness.

you want

woman-talk

silent-walk

sympathy

sensibility

personal, personal, personal.

you want to hear us

female families

feminine mammies,

want to listen

with your fading feminist ear

to our

mother-daughter-lover-speak

sweet nothings

absolutely nothings

so that we can

become to you,

become your

empty-woman she-her

breast-bodied other—

— 

fuck you.

i’ll be your

angry feminist,

your angry fucking

not-woman

wrong-woman

black-brown-woman-lover

lesbian

licking my lips

her lips

with my rug-munching

mother-tongue,

your wide-eyed

gape-mouth

just begun

because i exist

and i call myself

woman

but i don’t exist

for you.

— 

figure my fucking

mystique—

that second sex

which is not one,

chanting colored

voodoo hex

on your rising son

with, once again,

my salty-sexed

mother-tongue,

dripping

woman-

native-

other-tongue,

my wilting rose flesh

in full death bloom.

i will not

water myself for you

nor nourish

your wish

for a white-skin

red-dress miss

blue-blood bitch

always-already

hanged

suspect-witch

writhing

in kinky-pink kitsch—

— 

fuck you

fuck this,

i am not for

your wanting,

will not come for

your first, second, third

wishing,

do not speak for

your listening.

i am

not for you,

i am

for myself.

your doorstep is soft

with the pale bodies

of last night’s moths

and i stand at your threshold 

like wings surrendered

—

some moments like moth flutter

fade in the morning

fall in the morning

my back and my bones are aching from being a “man” today. sometimes there is not room to escape what others want to pile on my shoulders or in my calloused hands, and so i carry twice the weight, my skin blushing with bruises colored like already dead blossoms. i’m sinking like the way “muscle” sinks on the tongue. “muscle,” say it slowly and it lapses into beauty. “muscle,” slowly, softly. “muscle,” sadly. so many times i think i can’t do this, i don’t want to wake up a “man.” i need some ice to press into the pain racing up my spine. i need that collision, that melt. i need something to become more fluid. 

we are hushed like blood imagery.

breath on flesh under a blanket

sluice, flow, spill

—

we are imagined borders.

we have been being something all this time

something we love to think we can touch

and what is the name of the world now

when words are failing our tongues,

when the water has fled from our palette?

—

we know there is nothing to say, 

so close your lips on my wrist

like a suture that will never be there

like gravity building on a droplet of water, curling around it gently, coaxing it to the ground like any soft voice.

like any soft voice.

over margaritas, again, we empathize and analyze and slip into a rhythm of frustration and ecstasy, fear and hope—and for a little bit something small changes. we are the bards of our own being, the ever-sought-after legitimizing other half of our more than half-baked worldviews. we drink to affirmation. we can agree on how nationalism is consolidated; when the sexual becomes exceptional; where the radical is antiquated and forgotten. we find each other in the abstract, somehow, easily actually, and it is comfortable yet acutely temporal. frenzied, there is so much to finally say that i lose my voice every time. it is overwhelming and beautiful and sad and i can’t begin to explain any more than i’ve barely said.

our bones in arkansas

st. louis, if ever we really did make it there

was a bowing bridge,

a bending branch,

a bone-white birch

splintered—

all the birch like a bone-yard,

we should have known better

the embrace of some god’s ribcage.

i needed your hands

to help heal my color-scar

and you needed me to need that

i needed a friend

and you wanted

my need

my skin was

goosebumps and lotion and blood

and you made it

more vulnerable than i meant

made my need a want

i didn’t wish

but we left everything there

and are we better for it?

it may well be that our history until now
was made by mobilizing emotion,

it may well be that we flush and quell together,
brush and swell on a tether.

it may well be that we roll down each others cheeks
in a mess of tears…

someone says we all draw that sharp breath
before penetration
—tsst—

i think this at least is true.

we know this public feeling of waiting for it,
for the slip, the sting,

we anticipate the grip, the swing
of ribs bowing,

now of our collective knowing of
this tired trick
of your erect and flailing zombie dick,
undead prick,
and we are no longer scared
but sick
and it’s showing…