1. |
Introduction
00:26
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Love is not practical
No matter how hard we
try,
we can’t tell it what it is
or create rules to bar it down.
Love tells us what it is,
love is beyond us
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2. |
I. bluebells by I-635
01:32
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I want to think about the girls
in a late-summer field of flowers:
yes, you, trio of sisters, one leaned up
against the other in yellow dresses
posing for a photo as the wind picks up
as the rest of the world merges
onto the onramp behind us: the rest
of the world under the same white
fire sky falls out of existence. And
my mother’s cloud-clear voice at our criminal
(yes, it's illegal to pick bluebells in Texas)
bouquet: “We won’t tell.” and took
the picture, anyway: black girls holding
bluebells the color of the atlantic by break of day;
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3. |
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I wonder if they stayed the same,
despite—they must have thought
it was an alien invasion: TEXAS:
in a world without mercy, them and
I would be beautiful in our death;
could we forge a universe filled
only with negations and wouldn’t that
be mercy? what would we, I, they—
what would you know of fractions?
must I remember you within or without
fragments, little creek town, whom my
mother loved (how quickly they all
hurried from us) must’ve been fire
in that glass bottle: a hand holding
a prism up to sunlight: a black boy
buying a black girl soda to share
these dates go by so quickly
the porch still smells of smoke
the creek is low—the tadpoles:
an ode to the oak cliff that fled:
the caesura of first black family
to buy a house in this nice town.
gone: the sun on fire, and me;
I am incapable of throwing sparks
I start no fires and win no wars,
I own no spaceships. they fear
what was left behind, in all their
haste I wonder where they went;
straight into the waters of the gulf
or atlantic just to get away? or maybe
into the sun—
or maybe
into the sun—
how sweet and sharp this feeling
tastes with you all so far and yet
so near as half a century away;
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4. |
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the land from an airplane
window is all the same:
street, road, or blanket
of trees, cluster of houses
all the hills ironed out:
all dimensions taken
care of: uniform yet without
clean lines, so distant and so busy
I see hunger on the horizon:
so it is here, thirty thousand
feet above the ants and their
business below, I am struck:
I am trying to calculate the
physics of this hunger:
the energy exerted, the work:
someone send for a mathematician, give
me a teacher, someone who will listen,
who will count for me approximately
or exactly how many times
they could have walked away.
I wonder about the hunger—
I can feel it flex and bend like a
plane wing against the headwind:
what can be forgiven and what
cannot: what lies beyond the horizon
is inescapable but then there is you,
MISSOURI soul, I can see you from my
window. the altitude obscures all things
yet there you are
your body hanging by the rope; there is
a part of me that wants to understand,
and then there is my hand, snapping
the window shade shut
—if only the bough had broken—
the bough did not break. And the hunger
won. The horizon terrifies, and the atlantic
gnaws, yes, still, on the setting sun;
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5. |
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There were countless times in elementary and middle school when I laid awake at night staring at the ceiling and just wishing I could be whisked away. I used to pretend with this Max Steel action figure I had (basically think of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible). I told everyone I liked to make up action stories around him, but at night, he was just mine. My prince. I lay with him next to me, wishing I had a real man to hold me.
I wish I could take it back. That that part of my life had just never existed—wiped from the scrapbooks of my memory. But that was me. I needed someone. Anyone. Who just understood what it felt like. Because all I had were movies.
And movies were just that, right? Once the credits rolled, it was back to the real world. The real world where you learned to be quiet and not sing aloud, especially songs about love and dreams. The real world where people started asking questions if all your drawings were of girls (because that’s who you related with). The real world where every day was an experiment of what pieces of your true self you could reveal and what could be received and accepted. And some days, you just needed to fit in (even if it meant pretending).
After kissing my elementary school crush, I came home and told my parents everything. How I was filled with butterflies and could still taste her cherry-flavored lip gloss. How I even did it with tongue. I felt I had reached a rite of passage. Now, I could be like everyone else.
I was grounded. For the next two weeks. Turns out kissing a girl before you’re 10 years old is not acceptable.
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6. |
We were both young
01:36
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We were both young when I first saw you…
(“Love Story,” Taylor Swift, 2008)
It’s funny—this song is
about remembering when you
were young,
when you met a special person
I listen to this song
and I see her.
her long, blonde hair
(like Rapunzel)
her coffee-with-cream eyebrows
her faint freckles and dimpled smile
She was my special person,
the person I thought I
would love and give my
everything to.
we even dated for
a super brief time,
though I’m not sure 24 hours
in middle school really counts
it was a rough time for her
when it happened,
we kept being friends
“We were both young…” was
a song we could come together
to. it was our song, in a way
and I did love her
and tell her everything
even when I left for Georgia in 7th grade
and visited four years later,
something seemed to be still
there it wasn’t what I wanted
it to be though
four more years after that visit
I would discover I could never
love her the way I wanted
and so much from that part
of my life
seemed to be opened
as if I had only just
found the light switch
Love is not practical
No matter how hard we
try,
we can’t tell it what it is
or create rules to bar it down.
Love tells us what it is,
love is beyond us
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7. |
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I came from wilted lettuce fertilizer
tended by lonely cracked fingers.
My roots start below the mountain
but I’ve grown alongside it
sometimes I can see the sun.
You call us inspiring.
My seed was raised to sustain itself with less
because the wind beats my branches bald
and the blight comes back every summer
and I’ve got to squeeze water out of vinegar
and my skin keeps getting thicker
and I’m clinging to your windowsill
You call us survivors.
But you spring up like sweet tobacco in your season
misted by distilled rain
cradled by ripe earthworms
warmed by red lights
and I finally see the trellis you’ve been climbing
under the roof of your greenhouse,
perched on the mountaintop.
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8. |
IV. 13 march 2020
03:13
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Where do I go to bury all the bodies
that aren't there? The ones with heartbeats,
still—the ones that are waiting, still.
There is only so much the body can hold.
I wonder what happens to the rest—
what becomes of the overflow?
Does it seep down into KENTUCKY
soil? Deep down ‘till it hits american
bedrock?
Or does the digging of the wound bite
into a body’s DNA? Riddle or puncture
holes between the protein sequences. Turn
the four bases into gaps—into gasps.
The soul struggling for inhale. Sometimes,
this news makes a body feel like
it can drown surrounded by air. Yes,
I am begging and begging with my own
salted heart bleeding out between my teeth.
Sometimes,
I remember how deep this dark goes.
What decays and what does not?
The whole of flesh.
This sinking heat I own.
Heat that crackles and breaks along its surface;
the heat that eats and eats and knows no bedrock.
Heat that knows the waters because it knows the fact:
just one foot in a riptide is enough of an excuse
for the atlantic to swallow you whole.
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9. |
V. the atlantic
00:41
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the atlantic
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Fifth Wall Performing Arts Ann Arbor, Michigan
An artist-led experimental performing arts organization.
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