slick with warnings? They began with mirrors, changeable
as their skins under sun, before they looted masks
with empty eyes - hollow songs, stretched goatskin under
untutored hands. Dead goats on their own can not bleat
the drum’s message; all the earth’s miles can’t sever song
from your tongue. I see your off/spring dance our river ‘(s) kin
v - fire
I will not speak of fire. You did not burn. Let me
tell you what I’ve learned; in one language, fire is
also invitation, you change the tone in another – blood,
in a third, fire is your father. It is not prestidigitation
that smoke casts shadows. You are the invisible man, Anyemi,
the woman at the back of a bus; I am the one who reclaimed
my name. I am my father’s second son; if I am missing
the first will be questioned. This is how our absence was
marked: girls and boys eating with twin names no one to watch,
fingers squeezing otɔ, but too distracted to know its fire –
an antelope with a single antler carries pain in the neck.
vi - bones
I will not speak of fire. You did not burn. Let me
tell you what I’ve learned; in one language, fire is
also invitation, you change the tone in another – blood,
in a third, fire is your father. It is not prestidigitation
that smoke casts shadows. You are the invisible man, Anyemi,
the woman at the back of a bus; I am the one who reclaimed
my name. I am my father’s second son; if I am missing
the first will be questioned. This is how our absence was
marked: girls and boys eating with twin names no one to watch,
fingers squeezing otɔ, but too distracted to know its fire –
an antelope with a single antler carries pain in the neck.
vii – paper
Some mornings my eyes water with your wounds, all
the tiny hairs that must have taunted the flames
before they spread their tongues on your skin. I am free
because you are smoke. I think of memory as retained folds
in paper that was once origami; I think of memory
as the layers an onion holds: both of them fade
in heat but something lingers; this be the twist
of DNA that syllabled Ebonics. Any rapper will know this;
that language is paper, that onions turn translucent
but collards stay green. I’m applauding you from outchea
money – mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo, mo.
viii – language
When we pour Schnapps on the earth, when you tip
liquor onto concrete, it does not trickle into graves.
There is a place called sɛɛsane where the trees bloom
with hindsight; this is where our dear departed sit –
ancestors side-by-side with boys assassinated for skin
crimes: this is Africa, this is America. Our nyɛmɛɛ
and sisters have been showing them the charts, unspooling
the con: in that world darkness defines kinship
not language. Remember the snippets of that Song
of Solomon: because I am black; our bed is green... through
the lattice. Language is lattice – we are whole behind it.
ix – cracks/stone
I have learned the caution of geckos. Black
and pale, they pale into the cracks of barriers;
when they lose a tail it grows back. We have a history
hacked off by marauders: what we’re taught now is knowledge
without a body. My grandmother on home soil was one
of the first trained midwives we are told. We are left
though, with the mystery of her miracle birth; who first
cut the cord that bound her to water? Who delivered
all those babies on the plantations in the wading years before
their bodies were allowed to cross the threshold of hospitals
their chattelled fathers muscled out of rocks both black and pale?
x – remains
If we have so many words for family, how
can you be gone? Brer, Anyemi, Omanfo, how
were we broken? I am thinking now of subtraction;
perhaps that is the unspoken angle, the unused eye.
The one whose fortune it is to stay behind may be as blessed
as cursed, for what becomes of the remainder after
the division? That little (r) stuck to its side like a sca(r)
while the rest take the ska? Breaking that beat, Money,
nobody is taken without family left behind, no chariot
rolls without leaving tracks. There are tears in our wake
enough to raise Jordan. The sea between us is common salt.
xi – helix
Listen, Ma, if between rainy days and blue skies
some fool asks you to prove it, don’t bother with ancestry
websites; I know by the way you walk you took fire
for me, I can hear in your voice the drums they forbade
you to play. Our unspoken pact was to somehow survive.
So hold my hands now, Ace, and let’s reshuffle, throw
out the balm of forgetting, read the boomerang’s marked hide.
You are no longer an antelope alone – we are an entire
herd. You can wade in the water. I’m looking out for you.
My antlers, like yours, (r) an eleven (11) on the head: multiplied
we equal 121 – one to one let’s unravel helices, let’s talk.
* Brer, Anyemi, Omanfo, Manyo, I’naa nabi, Money, Ma, Ace, Abusua – various words/slang for addressing family members
Tree of the Invisible Man
I can say nothing of its name, save the name
of the factory behind which it stood, the one bleeding
dyes all day, making gutters that once were streams
a carnival of bright death – green, red: Golden
Textiles. The tree itself was a lesson in the art
of contortion, its hard angles an eloquent semaphore;
clear lines of survival under abuse. It had a hole
right through its trunk. First we peeked through it,
but months later we stopped only to see who could
make a matching chink
through cellulose
– that narrow
body. I see its shape now as I close my eyes, the seven
punctures we managed to riddle it with, the pens it cost us,
coat hangers, twisted forks, a stolen corkscrew, the pale
gleam of those offerings at its base when the sun set;
the view through the gaps if you stepped back – squinted,
as though the eight holes were one, no bark between.
Its dark roughness is the skin I inhabit in this dream
where I’m away from home, visible as a threat, unnoticed
though breathing. I count the bullets shot by ganged boys
in
