Aracelis Girmay

You who cannot hear or cannot know the terrible intricacies of our species, our minds, the extent to which we have done what we have done,& yet the depth to which we have loved what we have loved — the hillside at dawn, dark eyes outlined with the dark sentences of  kohl, the fūl we shared beneath the lime tree at the general’s house after visiting Goitom in prison for trying to leave the country (the first time), the apricot color of camels racing on the floor of  the world as the fires blazed in celebration of  Independence. How dare I move into the dark space of  your body carrying my dreams, without an invitation, my dreams wandering in ellipses, pet goats or chickens devouring your yard & shirts. Sea, my oblivious afterworld, grant us entry, please, when we knock, but do not keep us there, deliver our flowers & himbasha bread. Though we can’t imagine, now, what our dead might need, & above all can’t imagine it is over & that they are, in fact, askless, are needless, in fact, still hold somewhere the smell of coffee smoking in the house, please, the memory of joy fluttering like a curtain in an open window somewhere inside the brain’s secret luster where a woman, hands red with henna, beats the carpet clean with the stick of a broom & the children, in the distance, choose stones for the competition of stones,& the summer wears a crown of  beles in her green hair & the tigadelti’s white teeth & the beautiful bones of Massawa, the gaping eyes & mouths of its arches worn clean by the sea, your breath & your salt. Please, you, being water too, find a way into the air & then the river & the spring so that your waters can wash the elders, with the medicine of the dreaming of their children, cold & clean.

I run high in my body on the road toward sea. I fall in love. The things the wind is telling me. The yellow sky quiet in her quiet dress. Old birds sending news from the reddish hills. & the one hawk flying in the distance overhead. That hawk is what the wind says. In love with the heaving of my peacock chest, with my lungs, two wings, such flying things, but mine for now, just for now as I open my stride above the good, dirt road, fall in love with the mustard & coriander dust, & the far, far mountain beveled by light, by rain, the easy eye of the sun, now, smoke floating across the hillside like a face I knew once very well. Very well, I fall in love with the flowers & the wash hung like prayer flags, see, in red Juanita's yard. In love with the earth the color of earth. In love with the goats, their bellies & hooves, & the goat mouths bleating as they greet me on the road. I fall in love. How they wear their strange & double-eyes. How they do not blink or laugh at me or say a thing I understand when I ask them in my English, because they circle around my feet, as if they always knew me, Were you my children once? Did I know your names? Oh, little magics? Little children?

sister was the wolf & could cross easily through the mountain dark to den keen & quivered with the muscular siege of slit    purse purple with hours purse purple with birthwork her sight both inward- & outward-lit on what small sparkle of pyrite in the silt or the thick smell of her own wilderness opening shit & hair & blood each little birth an astonishment of form inside its own tiny veil licked toward the air of this Other Side [Live!] then that sound from the hospital’s infant table after what seemed like years of silence     a mew which held inside it all the voices of this dream & other animals trying to begin

Please raise your hand, whomever else of you has been a child, lost, in a market or a mall, without knowing it at first, following a stranger, accidentally thinking he is yours, your family or parent, even grabbing for his hands, even calling the word you said then for “Father,” only to see the face look strangely down, utterly foreign, utterly not the one who loves you, you who are a bird suddenly stunned by the glass partitions of rooms. How far the world you knew, & tall, & filled, finally, with strangers.

If there is a god, let it be the hyena who plunges her mouth into the river after eating our grandfather’s poisoned bait, who, dark with thirst, poisons the river unbeknownst to both of them. Her ghosts stand in the street where we are called already through “time” out of our houses. She tells her stories. We tell her ours. We all clean our teeth with what is sharp. She asks,Will you add this story to your stories of history & land & peace? Yes, we will add this story. We ask her, Will you add these poems to your repertoire of songs about hunger & thirst & fur?& she, being wiser than we, says,Yes, I will sing them if you grant me your permission to turn them into poems about a mercy.

the afterworld sea there was a water song that we sang when we were going to fetch river from the river, it was filled with water sounds & pebbles. here, in the after-wind, with the other girls, we trade words like special things. one girl tells me “mai” was her sister’s name, the word for “flower.” she has been saving this one for a special trade. I understand & am quiet awhile, respecting, then give her my word “mai,” for “water,” & another girl tells me “mai” is “mother” in her language,& another says it meant, to her, “what belongs to me,” then “belonging,” suddenly, is a strange word, or a way of  feeling, like “to be longing for,” & you, brother, are the only one, the only one I think of  to finish that thought, to be longing for mai brother, my brother

after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to study stars. “I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium...So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. & all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance...Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna...I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is the [thing] along the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.” —NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007 Body of space. Body of dark. Body of light. The Skyview apartments circa 1973, a boy is kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who (it is important to mention here his skin is brown) prepares his telescope, the weights & rods, to better see the moon. His neighbor (it is important to mention here that she is white) calls the police because she suspects the brown boy of something, she does not know what at first, then turns, with her looking, his telescope into a gun, his duffel into a bag of objects thieved from the neighbors’ houses (maybe even hers) & the police (it is important to mention that statistically they are also white) arrive to find the boy who has been turned, by now, into “the suspect,” on the roof with a long, black lens, which is, in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon & depending on who you are, reading this, you know that the boy is in grave danger, & you might have known somewhere quiet in your gut, you might have worried for him in the white space between lines 5 & 6, or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding your breath for him right now because you know this story, it’s a true story, though, miraculously, in this version of the story, anyway, the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives to tell the police that he is studying the night & moon & lives long enough to offer them (the cops) a view through his telescope’s long, black eye, which, if I am spelling it out anyway, is the instrument he borrowed & the beautiful “trouble” he went through lugging it up to the roof to better see the leopard body of space speckled with stars & the moon far off, much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing out) the distance between the white neighbor who cannot see the boy who is her neighbor, who, in fact, is much nearer to her than to the moon, the boy who wants to understand the large & gloriously un-human mysteries of the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,” has not been killed by the murderous jury of his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof. This boy on the roof of this poem with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body as I write this poem my body is making a boy even as the radio calls out the Missouri coroner’s news, the Ohio coroner’s news. 2015. My boy will nod for his milk & close his mouth around the black eye of my nipple. We will survive. How did it happen? The boy. The cops. My body in this poem. My milk pulling down into droplets of light as the baby drinks & drinks them down into the body that is his own, see it, splayed & sighing as a star in my arms. Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars. Maybe he will be (say it) the boy on the coroner’s table splayed & spangled by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last. Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning, splendored with breaths, turned, by time, into, at least, this song. This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul” caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net, then, whoosh, back into the sea of space. The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing only things ordinary as water & light.

The body, bearing something ordinary as light                           Opens as in a room somewhere the friend opens in poppy, in flame, burns & bears the child — out. When I did it was the hours & hours of breaking. The bucking of it all, the push & head not moving, not an inch until, when he flew from me, it was the night who came flying through me with all its hair, the immense terror of his face & noise. I heard the stranger & my brain, without looking, vowed a love-him vow. His struggling, merely, to be split me down, with the axe, to two. How true, the thinness of our hovering between the realms of Here, Not Here. The fight, first, to open, then to breathe, & then to close. Each of us entering the world & entering the world like this. Soft. Unlikely.      Then — the idiosyncratic minds & verbs. Beloveds, making your ways to & away from us, always, across the centuries, inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this 
iteration of you or you or me might come to be at all — Body of fear, Body of laughing — & even last a second. This fact should make us fall all to our knees with awe, the beauty of it against these odds, the stacks & stacks of near misses & slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next & next. Profound, unspeakable cruelty who counters this, who does not see. & so to tenderness I add my action.

What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed? Perhaps one day you touch the young branch of something beautiful. & it grows & grows despite your birthdays & the death certificate, & it one day shades the heads of something beautiful or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out of your house, then, believing in this. Nothing else matters. All above us is the touching of strangers & parrots, some of them human, some of them not human. Listen to me. I am telling you a true thing. This is the only kingdom. The kingdom of touching; the touches of the disappearing, things.

Last night, all night the dream, the dead mother, my small sister, tiny, her mouth over my shoulder (screaming) like a knapsack when she heard the news, & my brother playing the stereo. I howled like the coyotes; myself. & saw the light outside below the window, my mother, young, playing with me at a rock, in some sunlight falling over us. I was small. An old & famous woman asked her questions: Who wrote this dream? I wanted to know. My brother thought it was our mother who wrote it when she was old. She did not die, he thought. But I knew, & called down to the cotton-head of her then, when she could not see or hear me. She would never hear me. I was not capable of talking then, yet, & she had died, after all, & the mother I call to tell the dream will not remember, after all she was not born then, yet, & needed the first mother to die before she could use her name & feed her children.