Three Poems
by henry 7. reneau, jr.
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back .
for Anika Roach , the Artiste perpetuating the uniqueness of the Black experience .
[The faceless and genderless figures . The missing limbs
.] We are stardust
constituted from the sidereal galaxy that spun us into being
, I and I , booty-dancing with the spirit
. We could only hear the howling wind
, and feel the wolf pack circling , despite our greetings , our
small acts of kindness
. We are always being told
even our embraces
colored outside the lines of the mainstream’s inclusivity
. The dream of flight , of freedom
, historically turned to pillar of salt
. Is the colonizer’s unwillingness to let go of habit
, possession & tradition . The material excesses
of Progress—a Fibonacci sequence
of accumulative incrementalism
, every acquisition built upon a previous transgression
. Is our mysterious , & ancestral force
of generational discontent ; the plantation lullabies
—watch what They mouth say , but listen
to what They hands do
, that warn of They who begat children , then grand-
children , each learning a new and accepted way to be hateful
. We sought a place of peace , to thrive
, as if having done that , been there, before . Our human
semblance at once where our similarities to them ceased
. [The faceless and genderless figures . The missing limbs
.] Our memories stowed in yellow amber—that which mattered most
about all that was taken , or lost , and only later
diss/remembered . Our acquiescence placed just so , in plain sight
, so as to be easily found
by the Magic Negro . Our empathy , that only wanted to
transcend misunderstanding , there , an anxious seeking
from some parallel universe
where the Dream could find refuge
from the loose cannon of bigotry
. Where ? How ? When ? can it all begin anew
? Frontiers have always attracted the Other
, the bodies LEGO-stacked
by the hierarchy of caste , become mostly a hegemony
of coercion in Amerikkka , the forever foreign
in a limiting space , bemoans lamentation or
clamors a forceful dissent in protest
, an awareness that extends beyond
the introspection of a poem , the painting
overflowed the edges of its borders
to where the Other is always already there
. In every new frontier the Devil never goes hungry
.] Caste is the dominating usher in a darkened theater
, flashlight cast down in the aisles
, herding us to our assigned seats
. But where is the body
? They may not see us as in[di]visible in their outside gaze
, but They always see the Black
. Our blackness
forever attempting to root ourselves to a somewhere , as someone
, or some/thing . To conjure the last Obeah prayers of the day
like a weird science on the verge of pro-Black (minus Oreo
-speak) is the Hell No !! bravado of our dignity
like everything uppity coming out the speakers
. But where does it all end
? I can’t tell you our story
without telling you all the stories that came before . Each breath inhaled
traced back to an ancestral lineage of dispossession
. To the iridescent yellows, reds
, pinks and hem
-frayed Blue(s) , to the pursuit of happiness
, or the first refrain of I’ll-give-you-something-to-cry-about
like the tantrum wailed the selfish violence of a child
for everything it wants
, the connection of the human touch just beyond reach
, vs. the paradox/ : love thy neighbor as thyself
. To look beyond the white spaces
, to experience the colorful arabesque of co-existence
vs. the owning of all of everything
upon which They always direct their wanting
. [The faceless and genderless figures . The missing limbs
.]
trans/circularities
the whorled vertigo of humming violence , where confrontation is like being alive at the end of the world . the ghost/acres of malevolent intangibles and schemes of underhanded intentions , and the thousands of exiles from a conquered eden , are thres/holes , like a complex sentence written into another war in the year of the lord , 2024 . the cataracts of our raging centuries like the terrifying beauty of the death of one thing required for the life of another , because we didn’t want our children to grow up with the same fears we ingested . the collisions and transformations of fugue states of extraordinary rendition and torture . the bone truth of dark/acres of empathy’s withering like an equation to separate particles of infinity . time is the thing a body moves through the unraveling of the world . the hope of revolutionaries , who tried again and again and again , with bloom upon them and also with blood , has carried us this far . it will end with us , verging on the pertinent , are the things we must have known , like notes on the possibilities and attractions of existence . the ripple effect of rough and savage rounding human willfulness to the routine disruptions at the edges of peripheral vision . the prayers of an accidental nature for that one thing that can save us , our life’s blood , the only thing we have ever found safe enough to trust , gushed like flood from flesh and spirit . this orphanage of dreams in the mitochondrial night . only a filament between past and present , us and them , with some sort of future implied , like glass ground ‘till the wheels fall off
The Exogenesis of Ghosts
#1.
Silence is an imposed construct that calcifies the tongue. Silence fuels the repetition of injustice and atrocity, until the truth becomes a hidden relic in the ruins of deceit. Silence harbingers tribulation coalescing from denial and indifference, naked, bloody and glowing, a constellation of ghosts haunting the distance between fear and generations of plantation lullabies carved onto a hard-shelled tabula rasa. Silence is a gnawing trepidation
as keenly calibrated as a railroad watch/ : 8:46
9:03
9:59 and 10:29—the times
when two hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center buildings
and the twin towers to Mammon collapsed;
time itself was destroyed, a free-fall demolition in slow motion.
The quantum mechanics of Ground Zero,
like an equation rubble-ized to soundbytes
that could be interpreted in any way we wished. The human voice
harvesting the silence of the dead from the vetted official accounts.
Silence feeds us a designated complement of guest-experts
poisoning the truth
to a radioactive rumor spawning its own Chernobyl. The regimented rhetoric
repeated in increments of clockwork complicity.
Speculation, counting off transgressions
one finger at a time.
And some scarecrow effigy of fear without a voice, the salt-filled mouth,
rumoring an era of periphery shifts and ripples
created at random, the dread
crawling ahead of Death and
living on its fumes. Most often
an era of disinformation. How? the whole nation went insane
all at the same time. How?
September 11th dismantled
and revised the full text of freedom within the borders of Empire. A silence
deeper than silence, emboldened the malingering voices of the dead,
calling out to the living
to question the falsehoods catapulted into newsprint upper-case.
Some thing
we couldn’t really put our finger on, but felt was true, a skepticism
of doubt, just out of earshot, and the forked tongues
like a needle stuck in the groove of repetition,
the way indifference makes every atrocity
an anomaly? grounds itself between soundbytes and
censored photographs vetted the color of the official aftermath. The blood trail
persevered
beyond the event itself,
crossing continents
and spawning years of retribution. The cruelty of war, and repression
characterized by extreme violence and human rights abuses.
#2.
Silence hurtles forward feigning security that walks like a war song. Parabolic
into the wounded world. The slammed-door of closed mouths
gone blind in Operation Enduring Freedom's wake. The unspoken,
redacted story
censored within the confines of national security, a strategic truth,
as if continents were diagrams, lines on a map,
the laws of acquisition
shrinking the big picture, to diminish courage
to an era complicit with deceit; looks ominously
like the glint of broken glass in lacerations. Drones a metallic dissonance,
a delirium of blackened feathers in a fever dream. Ideologies clashing.
Then, the silence of dust
burdened with vestigial noise.
A sixth finger on the left hand of God, that shapes now
with sharps and flats of constant signal.
Silence has a hum behind it. Predator drone-like aerodynamic
and mechanical murder in repetition, and none of us alone
in the complicity of others.
Silence is anxiety. The fear of making a sound,
is every breath held.
The silence of submission, like a man
-made scarcity
calibrated for maximum profit and an Empire of dust
socially engineered to follow. Silence multiplies the clamorous absentia of God
to a measure not of itself, to what has been maimed
and murdered in the pursuit of Progress. Silence oscillates
between the desire to be everywhere and nowhere at once.
#3.
The distance between our own inner peace and
apprehension, like a Styrofoam cup half-filled with hope and
our surrender
caught in a fast-moving wave.
hreneau@formerstudents.ucdavis.edu henry 7. reneau, jr. does not X-speculate, Tik Tok, Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram. It is not that he is scared of change, or stuck fast in the past; instead, he has learned from experience that the crack pipe kills. His work is published in Superstition Review, TriQuarterly, Poets Reading the News, Prairie Schooner, Zone 3 and Rigorous. His work has also been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He lives on unceded territory that Amerikkkan mythology wants the world to believe was solely discovered, tamed, and ‘sivilized by white people.
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