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Give me the night, you beasts hissing over the face of this dead woman, I climb into your eyes, looking. To those who would sleep through the wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them awaken, Ju-Ju, Tom-Toms & the magic of a talking burning bush. I am the queen of sleight of hand wandering the forest of motives, armed with horoscopes, cosmic encounters & an X-Acto knife. My right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot & Huey Newton, my left eye is prism of Wild Style, gold grills, lowriders, black dahlias, blunts & back alleys. At twenty-one, I stood at the crossroad of Hell & Here, evil peering at me behind a blue-red eye. I armed myself with the memories of Pentecostal tent revivals, apple orchards, the strawberry fields I roamed with my mother & aunts in the summer, & the sightings of UFO lights blinking in the black of an Ohio nightsky. I am a weapon. I believe in hoodoo, voodoo, root workers, Dead Presidents,Black Tail,Black Inches&Banjees. I believe in the ghosts of 60 million or more & black bones disintegrating at the bottom of the Atlantic, below sea level,Not Just Knee Deep.I believe that children are the future: love them now or meet them at dusk at your doorstep, a 9mm in their right hand & a head noisy as a hornet’s nest later. Your choice. Black, still, in the hour of chaos, I believe in Royal Crown, Afro-Sheen, Vaseline, Jergens & baby powder on breasts, the collective conscious, cellular memory, Public Enemies, outlaws, Outkast, elevations, “Elevators” &Encyclopedia Britannica. Under my knife, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz laughs with Muhammad Ali, a Lady named Day cuddles with a Boxer named Mister after traumatically stumbling on strange fruit dangling from one of the most beautiful Sycamores evah. Under my knife, Marilyn Monroe enjoys an evening out with Ella Fitzgerald, meanwhile,Life shows me a gigantic photo. I am a weapon. I chart voyages of unlove, high on a man called crazy who turns nigger into prince. I believe in Jong, Clifton, “Dirty Diana” & Dilla, paper, scrilla, green, gumbo, coins, Batty Bois & Video Vixens. I believe that beads at the ends of braids are percussive instruments in double Dutch. In the reflection of my knife, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington & Thelonious Monk argue in a Basquiat heroin nod. I am a weapon. I believe in goo-gobs of deep brown apple butter, alphabets, Alaga Syrup, Affrilachians, A-salaam Alaikum, Wa-Alaikum-Salaam, & African Hebrew Israelites. I believe in Octoroons, Quadroons, Culluds,Cooley High, Commodores, Krumpin, Krunk &Burn, Hollywood, Burn. I am Sethe crawling a field toward freedom with a whitegirl talking about velvet. I believe in tumbleweaves, hot combs & hair lyes, Chaka Khan, Shaka Zulu, Mau Mau, Slum Village &Buhloone Mindstate: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless. Like water.” I believe in water. My body is pulp. I bleed ink. I believe in the Fantastic, Vol. 2, The Low End Theory, Space Is the Place&The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Tucked in the corner of my right ventricle sprouts a Tree of Knowledge, lives a Shining Serpent & a middle finger. I’m on a quest for the Marvelous. My face is a mask of malehood, malevolence, one big masquerade. Metaphysically niggerish, I am a weapon wandering the forest of motives, a machete in one hand, a mirror in the other, searching for the nearest body of water.

I whole in body, and in mind, but very weak in purse, Do make, and write my testament for fear it will be worse. And first I wholly do commend my soul and body eke, To God the Father and the Son, so long as I can speak. And after speech, my soul to him, and body to the grave, Till time that all shall rise again, their Judgement for to have, And then I hope they both shall meet, to dwell for aye in joy; Whereas I trust to see my friends released from all annoy. Thus have you heard touching my soul, and body what I mean: I trust you all will witness bear, I have a steadfast brain. O God, now let me dispose such things, as I shall leave behind, That those which shall receive the same, may know my willing mind. I first of all to London leave, because I there was bred, Brave buildings rare, of churches store, and Paul’s to the head. Between the same, fair treats there be, and people goodly store; Because their keeping craveth cost, I yet will leave him more. First for their food, I butchers leave, that every day shall kill; By Thames you shall have brewers’ store, and bakers at your will. And such as orders do observe, and eat fish thrice a week, I leave two streets, full fraught therewith, they need not far to seek. Watling Street, and Canwick Street, I full of woolen leave; And linen store in Friday Street, if they me not deceive. And those which are of calling such, that costlier they require, I mercers leave, with silk so rich, as any would desire. In Cheap of them, they store shall find, and likewise in that street, I goldsmiths leave, with jewels such, as are for ladies meet. * * * Now when the folk are fed and clad with such as I have named, For dainty mouths, and stomachs weak some junckets must be framed. Wherefore I potecaries leave, with banquets in their shop, Physicians also for the sick, Diseases for to stop. Some roysters still must bide in thee, and such as cut it out; That with the guiltless quarrel will, to let their blood about. For them I cunning surgeons leave, some plasters to apply, That ruffians may not still be hanged, nor quiet persons die. * * * To all the bookbinders by Paul’s, because I like their art, They every week shall money have, when they from books depart. Among them all, my printer must have somewhat to his share; I will my friends these books to buy of him, with other ware. For maidens poor, I widowers rich do leave, that oft shall dote: And by that means shall marry them, to set the girls afloat. And wealthy widows will I leave to help young gentlemen; Which when you have, in any case, be courteous to them then: And see their plate and jewels eke may not be marred with rust; Nor let their bags too long be full, for fear that they do burst. * * * And Bedlam must not be forgot, for that was oft my walk: I people there too many leave, that out of tune do talk. * * * At th’ Inns of Court, I lawyers leave to take their case in hand. And also leave I at each Inn of Court, or Chancery, Of gentlemen, a youthful roote, full of activity, For whom I store of books have left, at each bookbinder’s stall: And part of all that London hath, to furnish them withal. And when they are with study cloyed, to recreate their mind, Of tennis courts, of dancing schools, and fence they store shall find. And every Sunday at the least, I leave to make them sport, In divers places players, that of wonders shall report. Now, London, have I (for thy sake) within thee, and without, As comes into my memory, dispersèd ’round about Such needful things as they should have, here left now unto thee; When I am gone, with conscience, let them dispersèd be. And though I nothing namèd have, to bury me withal, Consider that above the ground, annoyance be I shall. And let me have a shrouding sheet to cover me from shame, And in oblivion bury me, and never more me name. Ringings nor other ceremonies use you not for cost, Nor at my burial, make no feast, your money were but lost. * * * This XX of October, I, in ANNO DOMINI, A thousand, v. hundred seventy-three, as almanacs descry, Did write this will with mine own hand, and it to London gave; In witness of the standers-by, whose names, if you will have, paper, pen and standish were, at that same present by, With Time, who promised to reveal so fast as she could buy The same, lest of my nearer kin for any thing should vary; So finally I make an end no longer can I tarry.

Ay, beshrew you! by my fay, These wanton clerks be nice alway! Avaunt, avaunt, my popinjay! What, will ye do nothing but play? Tilly, vally, straw, let be I say! Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale! With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale. By God, ye be a pretty pode, And I love you an whole cart-load. Straw, James Foder, ye play the fode, I am no hackney for your rod: Go watch a bull, your back is broad! Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale! With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale. Ywis ye deal uncourteously; What, would ye frumple me? now fy! What, and ye shall be my pigesnye? By Christ, ye shall not, no hardely: I will not be japèd bodily! Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale! With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale. Walk forth your way, ye cost me nought; Now have I found that I have sought: The best cheap flesh that I ever bought. Yet, for his love that all hath wrought, Wed me, or else I die for thought. Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale! Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale! Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale! With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

1 I count the rays of the jellyfish: twelve in this one, like a clock to tell time by, thirteen in the next, time gone awry. A great wind brought them in, left them here to die, indifferent time measured by whirling moon and sun, by tides in perpetual fall and rise. Englobed, transparent, they litter the beach, creatureless creatures deprived of speech who spawn more like themselves before they die. I peer into each and see a faceless red center, red spokes like a star. They are, and are not, like what we are. 2 At noon, in the too bright light, watchful, looking too hard, we saw the scene turn dark and lost the children for a moment, waves crashing around them. Shadow blended with shadow, the sun inside a cloud, and then the children were restored to us, our worst fears a hallucination. All afternoon their castles, poor and proud, rose and fell. Great civilizations were built, came to an end, the children mighty lords, their castles only as small as we are to the stars and starry structures. The day was infinite for them, time stretching to the farthest horizon, the sun their overlord. But how to reconcile these summer days washing away with our need to commemorate, to hold onto? They knew. And so they sang a song tuneless and true, admitting no fixed point, no absolute, words overheard and blurred by great winds blowing in, a rhyme or round for a time such as we live in: The world is made, knocked down, and made again! 3 This is the moment of stasis: gulls stall above the burned-out mansion on the bluff, gone for thirty years, and cairns rise up, stone balanced on stone. By evening, the beach is empty, my shadow a long-legged giant leading me past small battlements to the day’s masterpiece: a dripping castle, all towers and crenellation, tall as a child, made by many children, flying three-pointed flags that wave hopefully in the wind. Closer, I see the moat, the courtyard’s secret pool in which, macabrely, red jellyfish float, death and potentiality entwined forever. A crab small as my fingernail, dead, perfect in every detail, with hairlike spinnerets and claws, guards the open castle door from entry as night begins to fall and shadows dark as ink wash in to stain the beach. Shivering, I think, O sentry, who would enter here? 4 Traveling once, I stood under the open sky inside a great unfinished cathedral. Stonemasons, there for generations, clung like ants to thin scaffolding, carving griffins and saints, the rising spires and portals dripping like hot wax, and birds flew freely in and out of lacy walls, like angels thrown down from heaven. Gaudy and grand, it was a vision of eternal mind. Its maker, dead for a long time, had left no finished plan, design, but work went on, days turning into years, the century coming to a close. In disbelief, I touched each twisting vine and leaf, marveling at what had been done, and what was yet to be, and wished, as I wish now, O let it never be complete!

Dear sir, your air of authority leaves me lost. Eases me from a place of ease. Contracts with my contradictions to take from me a place. Autopilots my autobiography. Frightens my fright. Sighs with my breath. Wins at my race. Your certainty has me curtained. Your nerve has me nervous. Your childhood has me childlike and your nastiness nests in my belfry like a hawk. You are beyond and above my slice of sky, peach as a pie, bourbon as its pit. You are spit and vinegar while I sour in my bowl. You bowl me over while I tread lightly on my feet. You walk on water while I sink. You witness me, fisherman, boat on the lake, while I struggle and burble and brittle and drop. You wink at me and I must relate. I close my eyes to erase you and you are written in my lids. A litmus test. A form of lair. God with three days of facial growth and an old bouquet for a face. Soap and water for a brain. I have no handsome answer. I have no pillar of salt or shoulder to look over. I have no feather to weigh. I have no bubble to burst. I am less to myself, a character in a drama, a drumbeat, a benevolence, a blight. All parts of me say shoot on sight. Aim for an artery or organ. Good night.

Contemporary Folk Poetry of Crete FROM COUPLETS SENT BY SMS FROM YORGOS VITTOROS, MAYOR OF KYPARISSI Whose garden are you blossom to, to whom do you belong? Whose velvet down, whose feather are you, whose rejoicing song? *       *       * BY MANOLIS PASPARAKIS (BLIND RHYMESTER) My heart, it doesn’t fool me, even with the games it plays: All my nights are dark, but that’s the same with all my days. *       *       * FROM YANNIS PAVLAKIS’S CRETAN FOLK POETRY COLLECTION Take a look around you when the trees are all in bloom, And wonder why you’ve chosen that old desiccated broom. * The everything of the world is zero, the life of the world is naught; It is from nothing to nothing that eternity is wrought. * When they open wide the church door to bear his body hither, I’ll drag forth such a savage cry the wild greens will wither. * I want my darling filthy—it’s the dirty girl I trust— To keep her to myself and make the rest flee in disgust! * There is a sheer cliff at the end of the foot-path of our lives, But he whose soul possesses wings unfurls them and survives. *       *       * FROM 6,000 COUPLETS OF ARISTIDES CHAIRETIS The world is something I can handle when she’s in my clasp— But when she’s far away, it is too huge for me to grasp. * If I’d saved all the tears from when I first began to weep, I’d have a sea by now and I could float upon the deep. *       *       * FROM THE BARD OF SITIA, CRETE, YANNI DERMITZAKI Lower your branches, little one. This favor’s all I seek, Because when lightning strikes, my dear, it always finds the peak. *       *       * COUPLETS BY ANDREAS PAPYRAKIS, FROM THE VILLAGE OF KORFES, MELVIZIOU, CRETE, AS TOLD TO NICK PAPANDREOU ON NOVEMBER 13, 2008 Five thousand dreams I fashioned every hour of every day, But then along came wind and rain to sweep them all away. * Deep underground where no sun rises, no moon shines above, That is the place where he must dwell, the man who loses love. * Heart, break. Flesh, decompose. And Soul, desert the body’s frame. Since you denied me, go back to the dirt from which you came.

For Ofelia Camacho Delgado She wakes to the odor of sheep, trying to rub it off her hands. Dressed up in her native colors, standing by a tourist van, she is a dandelion, golden like the alpaca woven buttons of her sweater. She is done with the tourists taking her photo, holding a baby lamb. Without official papers in a new country, she briskly walks, and obscenely slow, a foreign tongue slithers by; its scales are the words she has not yet learned to trust. The baby girl hiding in her belly's nest will learn Quechua first,runa.                      the people The sick horses are pushed off the deck of a ship bound for Cuba. Pursuing, their heads bobbing, clearing the salt from their nostrils, they kick. As long as they can, they swim in the rushing swells, falling behind the ship's scent, swine and men. Know someone who needs their spirits lifted? Why not try a lavender or a rose scent? At the end of a hallway, a machine rattles and spits out ice cubes, some dropping, transparent on the dull vines of the carpet. Manuela pushes a cart of towels, shampoo, lotion, and soap bars scented with rose oil. Glancing down at the "Do Not Disturb" signs, she walks past the banker taking his third shower and the mother nursing her twins on a blanket spread across the floor. The peepholes are silent as a pile of dirty pillows, some dark never blinking, others bullet holes of light. Before leaving the Day's Inn on Mt. Vernon, she steals a few soap bars for her daughter, who places them in her dresser drawers, scenting her lingerie, fresh as cut flowers. A dandelion's root, far deeper, tolerant of drought and poor soil, is not an easily uprooted presence. Manuela hears the creaking of planks, the flapping of sails, and horses stomping, nervous, eyeing the full moon. She sees the marks of hooves in the sand, marks coming out from the sea and vanishing inland. She wakes to that odor again. This time she stands beside her Incan city, its green peaks cutting the sky open, painted on La Carreta Restaurant's wall. Her daughter is taking her photo, saying,"Sonríe, Mami , sonríe.""Smile, Mom, smile." The blindfolded horses are hoisted on board in belly slings, and their feet are tied, slightly touching the deck, suspended for most of the voyage, but once on land some will escape and revert to the wild. Know someone who needs their spirits lifted? Why not try a lavender or a rose scent? She lets the desert in, wild sage. The desert takes her back home while a farmer's pig crosses the highway. She sees her fake ID fly off the dashboard. The wheels of her upside-down car spin: Suspended, buckled to her seat, feet dangling, she spots the moon on the shards of her windshield, frozen tears, the peepholes blinking back at her. Death touches down like a hoof. A gust of wind pushes the seeds of dandelions upward, a flock of white, a gauze gown drifting over yuccas. Memory is the scent of soap bars taking refuge in a daughter's drawer.

Up in the billboard, over old South Station, the Captain, all wide grin and ruddy cheek, held up a golden shot of Cutty Sark high as the skyline where the sunset spread a gold fan from the twig-like spars and rigging of a departing clipper ship. Above the picture the dull haze of a real sun rose, dragging the day up with it. Seven o’clock. The agitated horns, brakes, fingers, and catcalls down below me were already merging and channeling everybody on to warehouse, factory, department store and office. My father and uncle talking over all the goods to be received that day, the goods delivered, their two reflections in the window floating like blurry ghosts within the Captain’s grin, their voices raised a little above the soft erratic humming of the big machines, the riveters and pressers, warming, rousing: The Century order, did it get out last night? And had the buckles come from Personal? Who’d go do Jaffey? Who’d diddle Abramowitz and Saperstein? Those cocksucking sons of bitches, cut their balls off if they fuck with us . . . How automatically at any provocation I can aim the words at anybody now, woman or man, the reverberating angry this, not that, in ‘pussy’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘fuckhead’, hammered down so far inside me it’s almost too securely there to feel. But I was thirteen then, and for the first time old enough to have my father say these things in front of me, which must have meant I was a man now too, I listened (blushing, ashamed of blushing) for clues of what it was I had become, or was supposed to be: It did and didn’t have to do with bodies, being a man, it wasn’t fixed in bodies, but somehow passed between them, going to by being taken from, ever departing, ever arriving, unstoppable as money, and moving in a limited supply it seemed to follow where the money went. Being a man was something that you did to other men, which meant a woman was what other men became when you would do them. Either you gave a fucking, or you took one, did or were done to, it was simple as that. Somebody shouted from beyond the office that Tony had passed out in the can again. ‘The lush, the no good lush,’ my uncle said, ‘get him the fuck out of here for good, will ya.’ The stall door swung back, scrawled with giant cocks, tits, asses and cunts, beyond which in the shadows my father was gently wrestling with the man, trying to hold him steady while his free hand shimmied the tangled shorts and trousers up over the knees and hips, and even got the shirt tucked in, the pants zipped deftly enough for Tony not to notice, though he did. Even then I knew they’d fire him, and that it wasn’t gratitude at all that made the man weep inconsolably, his head bowed, nodding, as my father led him to the elevator, still with his arm around him, patting his shoulder, easing him through the door. I knew the tenderness that somewhere else could possibly have been a lover’s or a father’s could here be only an efficient way to minimize the trouble. And yet it seemed somehow my father was too adept at it, too skillful, not to feel it in some way. And feeling it not to need to pull back, to separate himself from what the rest of him was doing, which was why, I think, his face throughout was blank, expressionless like the faces of the presidents on the bills he handed Tony as the door slid shut. The men fast at the riveters and pressers and the long row of women at the Singers were oil now even more than men or women, mute oil in the loud revving of the place, a blur of hands on automatic pilot, slipping leather through the pumping needles, under the thrusting rods, the furious hammers, the nearly invisible whirring of the blades. ‘Come on now, Al, it’s time,’ my father said, and the Captain seemed to grin a little wider, as if his pleasure there at the end of his unending day grew freer, more disencumbered, because he saw me at the start of mine, under my father’s arm, his soft voice broken against the noise into an unfollowable tune of favors and petty cash, and how much ass he had to kiss to get me this, and I should be a man now and not disappoint him.

Vien dietro a me e lascia dir le genti.

November 1941 We sat in the park, but there was a war between us, A dead moon over us and all around us The shy and secret whisperings as of the tiny Woods animals which in the high forest gather Wind-fallen goods before the frost comes. We praised as lucky all whose sure existence (As of the careless moon, the dutiless squirrels) Is not responsible for human history— Feeling how our happiness, how hope must mount Machine guns which other men yet have the firing of, How liberty is seen in the form of a fighter plane Millions look up asking, Is it ours? Our despair was temporary but not less painful. Over us the moon was quiet about its business, Pouring its constant light upon the naked beaches. The squirrels built up their small defenses Obliged to the fulfillment of a natural process. Their leaf-lined cell, the brilliance of the moon, The winter cannot touch and no touch tarnish.