after Dionne Brand
from Shanghai, from Chicago, from San Francisco
beloved,
another solstice,
and I am writing to you
from the wingless streets
and their countless faces,
wondering if I have done well
to love you not at all like
prey, as I tear through
traffic violations, migraines,
medicine bottles, through tear gas
and brittle concrete, through this uprising
of skyscrapers, this throat of glass—
even the end of this world
is ending, endlessly, still I am writing
to you, to say, what of sickness,
what of the contortions
language makes of my fissile
limbs and knotted lungs,
my chrome-laced blood dragging
through opiate veins, through cities
of debt and their serrations of air,
and what of this catalog of pain,
crucible where I collect shattered
pottery like moonlit verbs—love,
please tell me
how to make my way home
as my ashen lips and eyes frost
within the blunt
vertigo of mundane terrors,
accosted by the stone arteries
crushed in fog, the slick borders,
extinct rivers, the bombs
falling like fish,
I weep with the apricot sun
rising through city haze,
each dawn I breathe in
such stillness, everywhere
the smell of wounds and their fragile
promises of survival,
here the quiet
tributaries of desire,
the streaks of light
carving through the humidity
suffocating the atlas
of my skull,
and how else to wonder
where you have gone
as I roam the streets like an embolism,
gnawing my flesh, sucking the bone
marrow, love, how strange,
what does it mean,
what sky, what story,
what human, what revolution
are we beholden to
that I could hold your breath
like this across the distance
between two stars,
this is the first and last question,
and in between, what might I eat
amidst the efficiency of advertisements
and evictions, corralled endlessly
as I am by swollen bricks,
by the punctured myths of return
while the old buildings topple, all over
the city the sound of cherry trees falling,
what might I eat
while history leaves me
open like this in the shallow
chill of sutured days—
so give me a fire, a comrade
and a garden, or some days
the curled fist
of ginger root
and a hand to my chest,
it’s that simple, really,
though never easy,
to love you in the city
in which I love you,
your breath in my chest
like a knife, I hold tight
and search for you
through the thick air of policy,
the muffled asphalt, the banal axe of noon,
the shudders of empty rooms and doorframes
wet with fever and revolt, the ground
steeped in the memories of light,
their foraged distances of living,
the city convulses around me
with quiet incendiaries, the city
pollutes my liquid viscera,
I am embroidered to concrete,
I am stitched with cement,
I am rippling at the seams,
viscous still within this scarred
flesh of earth—
what is a city—
giant limestone, silica, alumina,
torn skin, limb, graffiti of bones,
what can I say, how can I live
wondering which proof of life I need,
which licenses and certifications,
whose degrees, whose defense,
what sort of petition for existence,
what evidence of violence,
whose picket signs,
how can I love like this,
eating the bones of the sun,
its corpse of light, its flammable horizons—
here is rage,
here is want,
here are the shadows and roots of a body,
here is our madness,
our sickness for ourselves,
say, freedom is
a sintering of phantom
limbs and strangled cadences,
and I am terrified,
our bones already scattered
like stars, our dying
hands still full of sky,
my fear a bright cluster, lodestar
toward which my ragged plumage
limps, alive, like winter—
beloved,
I hold love’s sharply
blunted knife,
I unzip the city’s
spectral ribcage, I open
myself, endlessly—
can you make me out—
this map of breath and blood—
what do you see here
