Marcus Wicker

But you made every delicate, elegant wrist & glistening ankle. But you made them beautiful in braided rope & dime store gold. But you made every necklace clasp. But you made them caress the nape like an errant wind after a shower. But you made every eyelash erotic. Every single strand of hair soft. But you made them from dust & bone. Made every glorious singing thigh. Every button nose. But you made them with holes— wide open to the faintest hints of salt in a sea breeze, salt in the sweaty mouth of a navel, salt in the blood, sweet in every wrong way.

No chain link fences leapt in a single bound. No juke move Nike commercial, speeding bullet Skittles-hued Cross Trainers. No brown skin Adonis weaving trails of industrial Vaseline down a cobblestone street. Heisman-shucking trash receptacles. Grand jeté over the little blue recycling bin, a prism of clouds rising beneath his feet. Nobody all-fucked in boot cuffs wide enough to cloak court appointed tethers. Or slumped over, hoodie-shrouded —sheepishly scary according to one eye witness. Definitely not going to be your Louis V Sweat Suit red carpet fashion review, coming at you live from E! & Fox News outside of the morgue. No chance for homeboy in the peekaboo boxer shorts. Homeboy with the frozen wrists. Iced. Homeslice with the paisley, Pretty Flacko Flag flying by the seat of low-slung denim — no defense attorney gets to call me Gang Related. Tupac in a mock leather bomber. No statement taken from the Clint Eastwood of your particular planned community, saying he had the right to stand his ground at the Super Target. Because my flat-billed, fitted cap cast a shady shadow over his shoulder in the checkout line. No, siree. See, I practice self target practice. There is no sight of me in my wears. I bedecked in No Wrinkle Dockers. Sensible navy blazer. Barack Obama tie, Double Consciousness- knotted. Stock dandelion pinned to the skin of an American lapel with his head blown off.

Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another pocket of  the room where six kids rocking holey T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls in words I cannot comprehend. All of this happening in a time no older than your last heartbeat. I’ve been told the internet is an unholy place — an endless intangible stumbling ground of false deities dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit in a world without flies. My loneliness exists in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched a neighbor braid intricate waves of cornrows into her son’s tiny head and could have lived in her focus-wrinkled brow for a living. Today I think I practice the religion of  blinking too much. Today, I know no neighbor’s name and won’t know if  I like it or not. O holy streaming screen of counterculture punks, linger my lit mind on landing strips — through fog, rain, hail — without care for time or density. O world wide web, o viral video, o god of excrement thought. Befriend me. Be fucking infectious. Move my eyes from one sight to the next.

For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and all were made to drink of one Spirit. —1 Corinthians 12:13 If in his image made am I, then make me a miracle. Make my shrine a copper faucet leaking everlasting Evian to the masses. Make this empty water glass a goblet of long-legged French wine. Make mine a Prince-purple body bag designed by Crown Royal for tax collectors to spill over & tithe into just before I rise. If in his image made am I, then make my vessel a pearl Coupe de Ville. Make mine the body of a 28-year-old black woman in a blue patterned maxi dress cruising through Hell on Earth, TX again alive. If in his image made are we, then why the endless string of effigies? Why so many mortal blasphemes? Why crucify me in HD across a scrolling news ticker, tied to a clothesline of broken necks long as Time? Is this thing on? Jesus on the ground. Jesus in the margins. Of hurricane & sea. Jesus of busted levees in chocolate cities. Jesus of the Middle East (Africa) & crows flying backwards. Of blood, on the leaves, inside diamond mines, in under- developed mineral-rich countries. If in your image made are we, the proliferation of your tie-dyed hippie doppelgänger makes you easier to daily see. & in this image didn’t we make the godhead, slightly stony, high enough to surf a cloud? & didn’t we leave you there, where, surely, paradise or justice must be meted out? Couldn’t we see where water takes the form of whatever most holds it upright? If then this is what it’s come down to. My faith, in rifle shells. In Glock 22 magazine sleeves. Isn’t it also then how, why, in a bucket shot full of holes, I’ve been made to believe?

Cul-de-sac Pastoral The sill plays a cruel joke—thrones me. Frames me lording over lawn mower stripes—myself in a shallow trench. In grass blades. Myself persisting, despite a dickhead sun—me in chlorophyll. Early, I find myself swaying—me! in the black chokeberry, me! in the rabbit’s throat. Me, the rabbit. Me dancing out pellets. Out-dancing myself— my father’s pellet gun, the hawk. The joke is a bright belly full of dark hopping along my father’s garden & the joke small, between wrapped talons, is the hawking too, is the axe sun, swift, rising, this joy. This joy, it swallows itself far too soon!

Consider the toucan’s festive gold breast. Its multicolored pecker, oddly cutesy & perhaps, a cartoon-comfort to the gym-roped Westerners reclining on a beach in Costa Rica. It’s the same old song: good-natured smile, hard work, a hat’s off kind of attitude & before you can say post-racial, you’re a Resort Toucan. The benefits are room & board but the cost is blood. Most times it’s the closest ones—birds of the same rainforest, same quadrant, same tree—who give up your whereabouts to the jaguar. Quick as you got the gig, the boss is tossing you out on your ass all over some flipped umbrellas & a tourist’s scarfed thumb. So now you’re roofless, alone, vulnerable & the beast is licking his chops in your mirrored aviators. Stifling too is the Midwestern Subdivision in its treatment of the black squirrel. Science tells us black squirrels have driven out native grey squirrels in numerous areas, but no bullshit in my development, black squirrels are relegated to lots with a view of the highway. Mornings they work shade for acorns between homes narrow as Lincoln Logs. History tells us black squirrels can’t afford robust landscaping but will pay their mortgage— chair the neighborhood watch if you like. Slenderizing, their night of hair. They’re sun’s prey. They avoid overexposure, make tanning trend. Black squirrels they fit in, get along. Know no one. They see other black squirrels & run.