Saretta Morgan
The dominant orientation veins a story about nature. Veins to negotiate a well-marbled
music of territory. Where one scar rots the length of an afternoon.
Then morning opens our chest to another science.
Thermal imaging. A whole being to radiate or convert to blood sugar.
I rest my head on the frame of a burning question and the future bends down
from its fine-grained neck.
Breathing.
The future skin-graft folded over our shoulders.
Militant roots open to the half-drawn beauty of corridors.
Fascia threaded to reflect the situation.
Split brilliant,
light passes through a moment which doesn’t mean the moment ends.
The moment continues with clarity.
I release a trigger
and rounds emerge pale wounds from the berm.
Even this sound our valley impresses.
Even the futures of thorned perennials bend. The thought breaks down in its escalation.
Always underneath it.
I want language for what the government did to my body.
The officers watched lengths of our street. Our legs
were barely covered.
Our streets illuminated threat read through variation.
Iris. Flora.
Bare repulsion blossoming anything you might ask for.
We studied the houses from their ugly numbered orifices.
The same in Panama. Kentucky. As
no contractor ever had another idea.
Hypothetically
I raised my hand.
A bruise re-drawn.
Withdrawn from the door jammed with heat.
Hypothetical scars may discharge to address error.
Any amendments being two or more or small.
A ridged letter after the last digit.
Being a room burdened.
Being that it breaks with skin unable to sustain entry.
Barracks and all their lights,
their social prefixes, forced open.
The error ached in our shoulders.
The error,
the hanging weight,
concerts of landlessness.
Listen to the territory open the bright hot door.
The name lost arrives under the knees of an idea.
No. We’re going to do it this way.
We’re going to fill our lungs up with juice.
Walking to the corner store on behalf of so-and-so
we put on our persistent faces.
In the face of
privatization.
In the width of
Electricity.
Of Diesel.
Prices are rising.
The increasing aftermath of repulsion is arrival.
Is a third-party contract and every nigga left holding the bag.
One impression restrained, another continues the terminal point of apparent
congregation.
Hours in which relationships must shift.
Our eyes were nearly covered. Our legs nearly cold we woke with the straightforwardness of
being Black regardless of what happened after.
What pattern of feeling we paid for, in some cases the orders identified.
Distal injuries accumulated.
The order’s warm
retching fever of–
it is how scale emerges.
I was trying to get in touch with the orifices. The long-lit corridors. With Family over in Waco.
But static smeared the archival record
and my cortisol levels were sky high.
The systemic invasion. Listen to the officers pause
for the territory to arrive.
The blacker the berry
the longer we had to wait.
Daily we waited at the barricaded roads. The tinted glass of half-drawn windows.
In the street forms were understanding and having always to be told
if you don’t stop
smiling
I swear.
We watched for the forms through which understanding was passing, proxy
to the conditions from which they emerged drawing intelligence.
And its other surfaces through vegetation.
Such a simple thing. Every story holds a collective body
amorously or otherwise.
If a sentence passes always-through landscape and that landscape is not vacant, then the texture
at certain points impresses the body.
Physically, physiologically, by shafts of perfect teeth.
By sub-skeletal fucking.
By the nature of it, and the nature that is in it, a warped bone in my breast comes to ache.
And from vegetation, a wound.
This scar along my thigh.
And from being broken, a science.
Grammatical, logical and quantitative
sense. This murderous clarity we cannot withstand.
If skin passes always-porous through language some texture is compelled by desire.
Try negotiating a census with your mouth full of sores.
In the tissue between militarized ecology,
this scar along my thigh.
And from being broken, a science.
Assume narration as transitive in grammatical,
logical and quantitative sense. This murderous
clarity we cannot withstand.