The Lot
sprout
lit small grasses waving:
backdrop of burn
the Bronx burned
echoes: ancestral/astral
this tiny
garden we
build the raised beds lean out this apt window
milky murder of dirt bleaked on sky
summers/stunners
before the city
made new
will
take it back
Understanding as an Imaginative Act in the Americas
Touch your finger long enough and steadily
enough you will forget touch: your body won’t
register it. Walk into a field of violets and your sense
of smell will shut off: a field of violence,
unrecorded. Found in a poem, this is a syntactical
saturation. Lose a limb and the limb remains
as a river in memory, and often as a felt thing, a haunting
What do we trade off so we can live psychically intact?
None of us have ever died a narrative redress
None of us can die here to haunting: embodied earth of me
None of us are allowed to die meets embodied earth of you
History is also: a particular fear or a set
of particular fears embedded in
us, like shrapnel, meshing with with the body
and resisting excavation.
The dead are never silent. Our bodies are
lodged with the dead,
diaspora rooted in new light/antiparadise
we can grow
anywhere
a plant seeds and grows, will be recognizeable
as itself in other than where
it remembers itself, a diaspora of people are not
plant seed, we do not automatically resemble
one another, community a sustenance built of
bridged absences (burned, I first wrote, by
accident, burned absences), we tamper, are tampered with,
changed, forced to adapt to the new, we are
the new; the new becomes us, or doesn’t: the remedy of displacement
is that we can root almost anywhere, we can make it work
out of almost anything
