Oh the POWER, Black History Month POETRY

Nothingness
 ~Dawn Lundy Martin

I don’t want to say anything. What is it to be saying? Force speech, rape speech. I have no subjectivity or light subjectivity. Speaking, defunct. Land mass floats. And the forests have been felled. And the antlers, snapped. Morphed lips, already sewn. Most of us are keen to mouth the word, “beast.” Everyone is talking talking talking like dentures, clack clack, but nothing is really said. Or so much chatter static. I am not saying anything either, am waiting and breathing. My body is speaking. Expressing the thingness of the thing. It chats at me, motoring. In the taxi, a tree shaped purple fragrance floats across face.


--


To be a red
scratch or
red scotch,
depending on
your liking,

calculation
of the sublime, or
the sublime itself—

Memory fixed—
—and
then splatter.
My mother in
her pink kitchen
washes what
the garden
and its grey
chemicals produced.
Outside, the gate
ajar, the dog
run wild-ing. A thing
called girl splay,
or wheat heart.
We could draw
a chalk line there.

This is not conceptual. This is a poem. You are a poem. I am.

The hesitancy.
The undoingness.

More secrets: humiliation as release.

The men all say “I want to stretch you out,” feel themselves big in this small corner of the world. How chivalrous, the ache of any obvious sliding down. What would the poem be without wings to block out the light?

Copyright © 2019 Dawn Lundy Martin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 5, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.