Author’s Introduction: Disinterested in traditional performances of black identity, FREAKOPHONE WORLD is a series of occult recordings, hauntings & invocations performing new black diasporic identities in an increasingly globalized society. At times Afrofuturist, Weird & intensely intimate, this is an unruly, resistant poetry whose infectious speaker utters itself as a fictional, yet recognizable other, & whose textual body is itself a diaspora.
from FREAKOPHONE WORLD
*
when a committee
casts
my goat-body into a whitestwhite-
nowhere so starved & beaten
i’ll tell you anything
at the merest gaze
of a chamber
shocks of jonquils
babble from a suture like
this suffer-maggot lapses
through the scrim-between-
worlds
kharak-kharak
excuse me any more room?
for my microbeak crowning
through a bullet-
wound in my temple my new neck
lolling like
no-complaints-here—
i am the corpse-lord
of a country that doesn’t
exist
can i help you?
if i stop moving
i’ll probably die
in my goo
money is so tight
this humble earwig-
demon sells the jonquils off
my moss-belly—
clicking my cleft-
tooth
when i am floating in the oil-scrim
leave a copper bowl in the attic overnight in the morning spill me
in the milk of your first-born in your arms & look down
into my eyes in the end when you too become a patina-green-
earwig-freshly-spit-into-the-infraspook it will be your turn to show me
a love without the barest
invasion
across the border
i’m not the only polyp
conspiring against the toad-
lord—
my bog-snout winnowing
in the marsh-fat-
lipping-along-the-harbor like
no big deal this is my friend
madam-silence—
when we billow
through this orchard
of tongues
an air-strike sends
me & my twenty-orphaned-
flagella
back into the infraspook
in the fallout
scientists studying
the stump-rings say
if i want to see
i must roll my eyes
back through the wide-black
poverties
of sunflowers
sprouting from every
socket
this body was evicted from
the well the photograph thrown
into these aseptic-zip-tied-
lips
every murder in its glass
periphery
behind each tinted-
lens there are treasures
so filthy we can hold them
to the neon
& see ourselves
mercury of my mercury
rising to meet the dusk
above the rubble where
my new hologram-
body crabs out to the fringes of its terminal
to ask the seafoam
how to shiver
*
when i am gone
& these fiber optics still ignite
as an ad for Nike
what then?
my gamma-tendrils spreading
over the hills like a klepto—
i wasn’t looking to be saved
when the maple-sprouts shoot
through a slit in the page
so my eyes can hatch
in a village along the tree line’s polychrome-
shimmer—
i scrape myself out of
the velvet-
pram in the glade-chafe
where the child-corpse deposits its mineral-
ring
before falling—
i hop a fence
& core the photoplasm from the book
like the purest cut of factory-
black—
for a thimble-breath of darkness
outside the sentence
i lift the veil
so my nematode-
sprites can get a whiff of empire—
when the first solar rose
repeats in the hillside’s optic-
nerve
we wring the image from the model like
a dye
& chew on its viscera
Leave a comment