Poetry & Playlists, Mix 04: Alive & Full

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When I say God is a cop, I mean to say god

      is a sergeant of sapphire and riot. He loves me 
      is a sergeant over at the local precinct. He keeps following me

      like a meteor hurling itself into my muddy emollient,
      like he's looking for a good reason to pick me up

      my fated impermanence. 
      or shoot.

I can't just say it plain. Not this. Not the terror of my lineage.

      I was designed to die—of course—but see how He charges
      I know how this ends, with me flat on my face again

     across my threshold & into my womxn, tearing through 
      and some story about my indecency,

      the many etches of my face, a symphony of lead 
      my criminal record—my history of theft

      playing into the palette of my ivory, blistering my cheeks
      playing out perfectly in the headlines—I'm sure they'll see me

      until I evaporate under the gas-doused kiss of yet another one
      as another one of those wannabe anarchists

      of His greedy nights.
      talking too much shit.

I can't say it plain. Not this. Not that which has always been.

      My womxn is a glass marble He eternally cut out
      What will I tell my niece about the gun

      from the breast of an Eon or a She,
      and about the handcuffs and about what happens when

      a god of another name now forgotten,
      a Black girl is the victim of anything,

      plummeting wet and unwanted
      especially when she is soft and kind

      into the gaping mouths of our descendants

      out in a world that believes she is

      branched out in the flushed indigo desert of here,
      some terrible threat to innocence,

      a place compressed through His filtered memory
      a liar looking for lies in what has already been fact-checked

      of our mutual existence, leaving scratches in the zodiac
      by god, by the sergeant, and the judge

      and on the lids of their eyes, a single flake
      and the president, dammit, the congress

      of Hir original form survived,
      of our country

      —a universe unceremoniously unraveled.
      —a democracy dying.

I can't say it plain. Not this.

      In His murderous light-stained hands
      And yet, after he has consumed

      everything,
      everything
 
      anything able to move
      we have yet to move anything,
                                                —is moved.
                                                —still.

Before that day, I did not know our mother
owned a name other than mother.

Just as it had yet to occur to me any mother might flip
the magazines of paranoia and perfume in a waiting room

without her children and be summoned before
a block of cells containing everything

she had ever lost. Behind the door she remains
a woman in need of attendance or removal.

It never fails. The entitlement of our memories.
Already scheduling a screening for blood. Tending

to the knees matter of dissolve. An arm
observed for tenderness. I remember

learning this difference
between a parent and the collapse

of a total person when I read the title
of her obituary in The Commercial Appeal:

"Ex-Wife of John Ford Dies in South Carolina."
And searching for her name,

I suddenly had an urge to piss
just as it happened back then on the road—

the pit stop where we drank one thousand
popsicles in the grass, visiting her childhood

friend. The air was a thick grit against our skin.
That night, you both were drooled

to the floor. I leapt over your spaceship
heads toward the toilet. Then there, I finally saw

her. Grunting naked above a man
we knew barely beyond this offering of sugar.

His thighs jerking underneath
and her teeth cuffed—Say it again.

It never fails. I stood behind the door.
Reading their outlines, uncovering

her name from the ground like a match
to a sock. I held that drawn out growl

just as a figure in the night might lift
a leg in the street to prove she can stand.

The narrative collapsing
in a room of displaced things,

which had nothing to do with us.

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