In Which I Travel to Alternate Dimensions in Search of Healing After Another Black Man is Shot by Police
In one dimension, I mail a dead bird
to every white person who reposts the video
In another I cry
for the first time in two summers
It is always summer
In one I eat fruits, gorge myself,
vomit, and with the vomit spell names
Redoshi
Tamir
Aunt Sarah
Boy
Allthesame
To Be Sold & Let
Louis
In one I meet every slave
that ever jumped ship.
They have turned into Tahitian oyster pearls
In the next I sell the pearls to a white man for one month’s rent
In each it is already summer,
unyieldingly hot
In one it’s dry heat, a high
of 105 degrees
like in Sedona, the July
Philando and Alton died. I pretend
I’m part of the Red Rocks.
They let me sleep there a while
I dream
like Martin, like mountaintop
but don’t wake up dancing
In one I’m watching a classic Western
but every cowboy is black
In one I’m watching a classic Western
but every cowboy is Black, capital B
Every black is capital
Speaking of dreams,
when I was a child
from time to time
I dreamt
I was falling
in blackness
always rolling forward
building momentum, but
somehow never managing
to go anywhere.
At least there
I am a child.
In some I’m not
or think I might be or
want to be but
can’t tell for sure
In one I yanvalou dance at a cop’s funeral
In one the funeral’s mine
In one I cut the hair I’ve been growing all summer,
sever the chances
I’ll be seen as a threat
In one I heal
from the men
but not the women, the children
The babies
brownskinned
buried
A white news anchor called Michael Brown a man the other day
it’d been six years since he died but he was
younger than me I still think of myself as a kid
ain’t I a kid, still?
My father always talks about how I’m his only son
and I can’t tell if it’s a thing of pride or a thing of fear
There’s always fear, stuck
unmoving as a body on the asphalt.
A kid on the asphalt
A man on the asphalt
It’s still summer
In one I ask God “When?” and hear nothing
but smell smoke
In another He passes the phone to Noah, who says
Now
I think of that line from Beloved:
All of it is now it is always now
though there’s something, especially,
about August
The birds come back stamped
Return to Sender.
In more than one there is no God
In every dimension I’m so angry I shake.
In every dimension I’m a flesh-
heavy bough I shake
the leaves from me I shake
the bodies from me I shake
the sweat from me
the summer from me
the blood from me
the time from me
I’m bare now, only the whisper
of something. A place
I’ve been before.
A dream I dreamt
a few times
as a child