My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 136

VI.
After, we learn that the bruise is a rogue singing
heart, its idiom blue in green, a single lace
of light on wingtips and freshly tossed dirt, like grace
released under breath to an deserted room. Bring
lavender. A watch. His second best tie. The ring
vowing you to a mountain’s silence and the trace
of a grandchild he would never warm with his gaze
like his still lives back on the island, still hanging
on the peeled walls. What does a sun ray sound like
through the vaults of skin, bouncing off the varnished cold,
rifling through the rain’s silver earrings and alcoves
of feather? What does it promise to breach the dike
of fierce, maternal clouds; what does it withhold?
Your refusals become her eyes’ trembling wolves.

VIII.
A burnt song. A dawn’s silvery spike. A murmur
like leaves or fingers in water. A lung of strings.
A warning’s siren. A prayer that leaves nothing
to fortune. A plate of warm bread. A stray daughter
asleep and returned to the hearth. A scarred river
of lights overflowing its banks with each passing
minute. A mirror and arrows of ash darting
through her hair. A thirst to follow, now a whisper
on her Bible’s threadbare pages. You hear her turn
the tap off, slip on the sturdy work-shoes and search
for the keys. This will be the seventeenth year she’s
yielded ruins inside her to love’s brazen urn
before another day on the belt. This small church
where to rise is to bear the ground under your knees.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

VII.
You tremble in the wolfish dim, drunk on the blood
beading your spine’s rim. Your palms are cradling your brow,
your palms are smoke. The Antillean is half prow,
half fin, humming ribbons of white sand, rolling bud
in one hand while the other gauges how to stud
the animal’s sheathed claw in your vertebrae, how
to defy borders of muscle and vein to plough
the proud flesh with amber, indigo, onyx. Mud
shifts insides you, like false memory: did not both
Kafka’s condemned man and his punisher commit
themselves to the harrow? Did they not aim to strike
against disappearance? Like a gesture, the oath
washing into air, you conjure again the pit
of her burnt song inside you, the calling’s last spike.

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V.
Don’t talk to me about guilt. Or the way shame sounds
like a plastic coated man shuffling behind you,
toothless and with stones in his fists. Orpheus who
is not quite dead, sitting up in his pool of brown
guts to pluck a harp. You make choices around
those pus-yellow eyes. When I say protection, you
want a naked sort of body. When I say true,
I mean a weeping willow. What’s under a gown
of ice. I mean there’s never been a time to speak
out of turn. Surely not at sunset, when a man
you’ve pleaded for all your life is wrestling to part
with his. Test the weight leaking out of his skin. Streak
his glass walls with your fingerprints. You will, you can
call him father. Look, look at the bruise in his heart.