Michael S. Harper

Debridement Black men are oaks cut down. Congressional Medal of Honor Society United States of America chartered by Congress, August 14, 1958; this certifies that STAC John Henry Louis is a member of this society. “Don’t ask me anything about the medal. I don’t even know how I won it.” Debridement: The cutting away of dead or contaminated tissue from a wound to prevent infection. America: love it or give it back. Corktown Groceries ring in my intestines: grits aint groceries eggs aint poultry Mona Lisa was a man:

a love supreme, a love supreme a love supreme, a love supreme Sex fingers toes in the marketplace near your father's church in Hamlet, North Carolina— witness to this love in this calm fallow of these minds, there is no substitute for pain: genitals gone or going, seed burned out, you tuck the roots in the earth, turn back, and move by river through the swamps, singing:a love supreme, a love supreme; what does it all mean? Loss, so great each black woman expects your failure in mute change, the seed gone. You plod up into the electric city— your song now crystal and the blues. You pick up the horn with some will and blow into the freezing night: a love supreme, a love supreme— Dawn comes and you cook up the thick sin 'tween impotence and death, fuel the tenor sax cannibal heart, genitals, and sweat that makes you clean— a love supreme, a love supreme— Why you so black? cause I am why you so funky? cause I am why you so black? cause I am why you so sweet? cause I am why you so black? cause I am a love supreme, a love supreme:

We reconstruct lives in the intensive care unit, pieced together in a buffet dinner: two widows with cancerous breasts in their balled hands; a 30-year-old man in a three-month coma from a Buick and a brick wall; a woman who bleeds off and on from her gullet; a prominent socialite, our own nurse, shrieking for twins, “her bump gone”; the gallery of veterans, succored, awake, without valves, some lungs gone. Splicing the meats with fluids seasoned on the dressing room table, she sings “the bump gone” refrain in this 69-degree oven, unstuffing her twin yolks carved from the breast, the dark meat wrapped in tinfoil and clean newspaper; the half black registered nurse hums her six years in an orphanage, her adopted white family, breaded and primed in a posse, rising in clan for their dinner. We reload our brains as the cameras, the film overexposed in the x-ray light, locked with our double door light meters: race and sex spooled and rungs in a hobby; we take our bundle and go home.

Those four black girls blown up in that Alabama church remind me of five hundred middle passage blacks, in a net, under water in Charleston harbor so redcoats wouldn't find them. Can't find what you can't see can you?