ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 125
The moon himself, your nightmare says, nigger, nigger too,
while daylight cooks its coonskins calmly, a finger held up to flag
she’s listening. I wake up just then, and go back to sleep through patience.
Nightmares ask me sometimes, with voices like cracking glass, enough
to make me wonder if deafness or insomnia’s a better way,
“Is what feeds, dismembered, your evening worth it?” And
sometimes I say no. Why should every night break my hands
and cut my face, and castrate, burn and and mock my screaming, too?
I remember midnights when I’d dreamed I was the flag:
thirteen strips of leather left to tan, to reward patience
and a judicious use of salt. Moonlight smirked and said, “Enough,
let’s smoke the cricket in his bone broth; turn him out midday’s way
by roasting slowly.” It took ten decades but I was cooked enough.
You’d save the link to learn to cook a nigger just that way,
and peel his penis, lips, his nigger skin, the way my hands
have learned, every nighttime, to cut, to peel, to cook, to do
for the sake of the shadow opposite daylight means for flags:
as if it weren’t just nigger skin. I have learned to remain patient.
It was all some nightmare, and I’ve learned to say so, with patience,
and steadily, the shadow that the moon made billow like a flag,
for war in some poor bastard’s country, where the full moon’s showing the way
you learn to think of fate, like oil on a sheet of dew
that’s frozen, the shadow that the sunset stitched to both the hands
you’ve raised because you think that raising them could be enough.
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