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(In)Somniloquy
She wants to shout at
her t.v. when some Sue gulps
earthworms from a cup.
She wants to shout at
this idea that there’s payback
for what’s done/to come,
“Earthworms aren’t
maggots;
eating them ain’t
planting a
tree or a flag.”
Earthworms aren’t de’-
composers nor dis’traction
from street corner noise.
“You’d think a woman
would know this,”
she thinks. This thought
a squirrel on a lawn.
“You’d think a woman”
—there are thoughts of other women.
More squirrels.
Her mother: “I’d
hate you to miss sex” when she
wanted to be a nun.
Her mother: “I’d
like to hear this. What do you
know about a man?”
when she wrote home about her lover whose mother taught
her to knit.
When she wrote home about knitting, she was still
girl-incognizant.
Still the girl writing “we are the faces we wear”. In
flashback,
still the girl with a face like a movie screen, who knit
skullcaps with
yarn red as cartoon blood, as red as Mammy Two Shoes’
shoes, matchstick heads,
yarn red as cartoon lips and tongues, red as bandanas
and pomegranates.
Color that
the temporarily color-blind
first perceive—red.
Color that
dis’appears in early film—
black, boot-black, blue-black.
Black as tar. Black as
be and lack. Black as boots, as
hollows, as holes. “Your
black ass, tar black ass
know better,” cowboy’s voice in-
sists from the stoop.
In Harlem, one can
never get a room dark enough
to lose sight of things.
In Harlem, one can
or can seem to make peace with
a tour bus of eyes.
Blackity-black girl
sitting in a dark lit by
t.v and streetlight.
Blackity-black girl,
at play on the court of your skin—
imminent domain.
History swarms in
the marrow of your thoughts (,/.) as
she lies there (,) sleepless
history swarms in.
To eat or not to? Then what?
She clears her throat.
“You can’t be eatin’
from everybody,” her aunt warned
after the first loss.
“You can’t be eatin’
like you don’t mind trading a
baby for red beans.”
That yarn’s redness bleeds Persephone, Eve, Jemima, Rine.
More squirrels.
That yarn’s redness: eating from a strange
pot/tree/hand/mind draws blood or sleep.
Post-troubles—
Jemima was the daughter
of Job’s winter.
Post-troubles,
Nancy Green plays pleasant aunty before
a car kills her.
How’d Job’s Jemima
become a handkerchief-headed
pancake mix pimp?
How’d Job’s Jemima
become aunty? “Jemima’s your
mama,” she thinks/laughs.
The way words rein in the
Late night, commercial
voices scream like auctioneers
on crowded corners.
Late night commercials
make her turn the tv down so
as not to wake him.
He’s asleep
after telling her about the boy
he was, his father’s fists.
He’s a sleep
she can’t fall to, a nap that
won’t keep or unkink.
In sleep, his face distills,
his eyes unencumbered,
his mouth ridiculous.
In sleep, his face distills
the meanness of skin smeared a-
cross bone and breath.
When Moses parted
the Red Sea as if it were
hair, was he tender?
When Moses parted
company with his crew, was
God at night enough?
Knots of a woman
who ain’t numb with want. Who’s not
effaced by shut eyes?
Nots form this woman
who sugars her mustards, who’ll
want but never ask.
In her body’s swarm
of swarms of cells of tissues
of sounds “Achoo” and “shush”
In her body’s swarm
of mundane sadnesses—womb-
weary, cash-low, years.
Her self is a sleep,
is snake-eyes, knothole, whistle,
skull, gristle, and nerve.
Her self is a sleep
from which his voice might wake her.
To what? To what?
Voice of a woman on t.v. offers her sick roommate
medicine.
Voice of a woman on a corner: “Stick you thumb up your
ass. Smell it.”
This hive of sound:
base-buzz, engine-crank, voices laugh/
seal the sonic cracks.
This hive of sound
bruises her last 2 AM nerve.
“As if beats blind us.”
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