For the Sonorous

Today I have no body:

 

He tears between the serrated collagen

of the bone my mother cleaved

 

with the strength of cacao trees —

cultivated among the flecks of pepper

 

sat ill-fitting on the tongue.

When he spat onto my skin,

 

potbellied groans welled like

ruptured blood capillaries,

 

a foam so grisly

there was no longer a me in me.

 

I carved my flesh from goatskin

so that he may differentiate

 

genocide from autonomy.

 

His hands taught silt:

a fine particle for rumpled sheets.

 

His lips taught wax:

a molded substance for crucified language.

 

His lips curl in that lopsided smirk of his:

braces a metaphor for fenced-in pleas.

 

He raps his knuckles against silk:

hands a synonym for slaughter.

 

I soak myself in mother’s milk

and garble swollen lullabies.

 

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THE EARTH’S EULOGY TO THE BROWN BODY

 

That evening,

the boy’s body becomes sanctified

against a canvas of brown flesh.

 

At midnight,

the boy’s body soaks

beneath rainwater

and becomes wet earth:

 

cracked dirt swallows him whole

but not enough for

them to decriminalize him.

 

When the sun rises,

he is not the one who stuffed

stout fingers in his mouth

and garbled guileless phrases.

 

By morning,

he is the white man’s spit —

 

            see: “I was scared for my life.”

 

There is an aftertaste

to the mother’s pain:

 

It lays on the tongue

like pavement giving way to grit.

 

Let her cries ricochet against

the concave of bone.

 

Let them splinter the skin of the white man

whose palms are coarse and tremulous,

wet against black steel.

 

Let them swelter and lay on the boy’s body:

            communion wafer.

 

Let the backcloth of trees curl

into the boy’s body

 

and melt away the throb

behind knitted brows and

bark-colored eyes quivering before a barrel.

 

Ballooned tissue heaves and

petals line his silhouette.

 

There is a dull finish to heartache.

 

Today,

there is no remedy for crimson.

 

Today,

she is silence disrobed:

full-throated, finely woven by her son’s blackness.

 

Today,

she glares at the officer,

uniform wrinkled:

               flesh.

 

She is mother

and shackles are her womb.

 

She learns the language

of weaponized skin

 

and soaks it along

the ridges of her teeth.

 

Today,

she is blackness unvilified.