tar baby
I figure there’s a
story about this already,
but mine’s a little
different:
* * *
there he is, glistening dark,
skin congealing of crude,
taunting me wide-eyed
long-tongued.
* * *
He’s just like his father, the carelessness that
birthed him, so rude, fingers on everything he can see,
swallowing the whole world whole, all his skin a mouth, effortless.
* * *
How does the earth plan to get herself out of this
sticky situation? Will there be a next
episode of this drama, or a same time, or a same
channel?
* * *
The foxes wanted something to eat, after all.
To roast it all and grin, to live rich at the summit.
But the smoke rose to meet them. The tar baby never stopped
* * *
hungering. It already ate all of the poor.
That was just its job. Its salary was
the flesh of everything else.
That Business They Call Utopia, Part Three
The vines will think they are veins.
They will try to eat the alabaster pillars
—mind, I have no particular attachment to those pillars,
yet still—
and its pillowed places will fill up with brambles
—mind, I don’t care about the comfort of those inside,
yet still—
and when you try to cut them, they will shout,
‘what about the lawn, turning lush, hiding stones?
you would rob us of a chance to rise up like them?’
And maybe someone will even say it builds character,
bulbs of ichor pooling in its guts. It shows its true heart.
Maybe some very cleansing organ waits to beat inside.
Here’s the contemptuous truth:
riot is a fertilizer, but some things prefer to grow
out of the flesh of better neighbors.
Yea, even rosiest vines will weed. Especially those.
Their roots gather apostemes, and gullible creatures drink.
What about the kinder tree, lost as this violence
rushed to cast bruise-shadows on freedom’s old stones?
Well, you say, at least the walls are clean.
Lovecraft Thesis #4
(‘Lockdown’ [Radio Edit])
* * *
At the anthills of acrimony
form brick-red rivers of magma to curse
the lost. They cannot seem to withstand
the slowly shambling thought that a people
in pain would wail. When the asphalt
becomes a singular novel cry, when the
bank building glass gives way to unlearned language,
they will trap themselves in their homes,
they will have revelatory trysts with their guns,
they will proclaim a broken sky full of gods of
destruction from beyond to eat the world.
And will that not be bizarre?
Fear will make them beseech steel idols, make
them tribute tin emblems of their own force,
make them remake the past itself just to sleep
past the din of incomprehensible prayer
chanting under the nearest streetlight.
And will that not reveal that
they are broken by what they’ve learnt?
They will struggle to forget that
if they seek to trap
a thing they worry will undo all the reality
they’ve worked so hard to steal, or blot out
the sound of truths too deep to fathom before it
ruins their ever-patient minds, then it is because
the neighbours they have refused
are as gods to them.
Lovecraft Thesis #5
(Visions of Bodies Being Burned, Track 6)
* * *
The man you say brought us here is a kind of prophet.
He saw the cloaks along the shoreline,
knew the foul faith deep within their threads.
Such powerful irony, then, to share a
tone of voice with those hooded shadows,
men who call themselves warlocks of a pure truth
they could never read. Ever notice
how they huddle around warped symbols,
pledge fealty to idols long since dust,
march on wearing capsized ideas
on their heads to hide from sight?
They hope some twisted nature will reveal
deserved kingdom, will let any void
glimpse them if they’ll have it, slip on
monstrous shapes they call heritage
and drift through the earth like wind-snatched
kite paper. And for what?
What else than to own the carcass
of a land already bought in blood?
That Business They Call Utopia, Part One
How it works, it seems,
is that there is this sharp-shelled
and bitter seed that digs its root
into the fine soft soil, strangles the edges
of our very normal want to eat
and not be torn to pieces, and sets its pistils
upward to the heat of a rage
so it can grow its barbs.
* * *
They apparently scatter all
on their own, shaken off the muddy
shoes of the big town pastor
and finding a spot in your lawn
so it can pick at the ankles of neighbors
and try to polish its petals foil-colored,
* * *
and if you have enough,
like maybe a few hundred in their potted seats
in a stadium somewhere willing to pick at themselves,
you can turn the sand beneath them into enough one-way
glass
to force the sun in every direction
into the eyes of mothers
whose names you do not know
and hope they crumble under their sweat,
* * *
so there’s a whole racket now, of sowing them
everywhere till folks call it a common sight,
till it busts through the concrete outside your boy’s high school,
till it catches the blood from my brother’s torn cheek and shimmers,
till its faintest trichomes try to pull the strings from my
thigh
so it can get at my head better.
* * *
I hear the easy way’s to check your gardens
often to see the spites sprout from the dirt,
a stern pluck delivered early before the sun warms it.
But barring that, once it’s run your whole yard,
taken your loveliest flowers in its ideology,
ask yourself: how do you want your lawn to be seen?
drop some amens
The Holy Barons rumble through
the untended slum-gardens against the highway
and drop payloads.
If the halo-copters hear you scream from downstairs,
* * *
you get one from on high, and it makes
a whistle on the way down and
* * *
falls against your prayers—
it goes through one girl’s bedroom ceiling
* * *
and suddenly her college first-pick
knows how to spell her name,
* * *
writes it on a very eager letter to her mother;
it falls over the edge of the general hospital
* * *
and my neighbor can breathe without burning
through the bullet wound;
* * *
bam over the house on the
hill
and she can afford to fix her eye
* * *
in Iceland without having to beg;
and bam in the river on the other side
* * *
and no more coughs or cholera
in the news the next morning;
* * *
and bam wins a granny the lottery one week
so she can keep her lonely son clean;
* * *
and bam loses an uncle the lottery the next
so he can keep his lonely heart clean;
* * *
and against the stained glass
for more baptisms than burials;
and against the muzzles
of things lost in the street
* * *
for less bad news than
boys made new.
* * *
I don’t know who calls in the coordinates,
where the map’s pushpin pricks turn into precipitation
* * *
but god, look at the damage littering this place.
It’s spare, and rare, but cratering,
* * *
changing people’s whole lives
with one whisper of gravity.
* * *
I just wish one day one of those
prayer-bombs could fall on me.
Acknowledgments
A thousand thanks to the editors and staff of the following publications which have housed these works:
* * *
Uncanny Magazine:
“Birth, Place”
“the one”
“time, and time again”
“drop some amens”
* * *
Arsenika:
“the lagahoo speaks for itself”
“The Metaphysics of a Wine, in Theory and Practice”
* * *
Sunvault:
“The Sailor-Boys”
* * *
Thank you to my family, especially my mother, Sandra, whose support of my work has refused to waver.
* * *
Thank you to my local poetry family, especially Deneka Thomas, Shivanee Ramlochan, Derron Sandy, and Arielle John, whose constant striving and dedication to outreach through the word has motivated me on more than one occasion.
* * *
Thank you to Karen Lord, without whose mentorship I may not have even sold my first speculative anything. Your guidance and thoughtfulness is a constant inspiration.
* * *
Thank you to my speculative poetry family, especially Fran Wilde, who has cast her magical eye on many of the pieces in this collection. Thanks again to Fran, and to Sara Norja, Karolina Fedyk, C.S.E. Cooney, Cassandra Khaw, S. Qiouyi Lu, R.B. Lemberg, Bogi Takács, Ali Trotta, Hester J. Rook, and so many others, whose friendship, conversation, and verse have been overwhelmingly encouraging.
* * *
Thank you to Holly Lyn Walrath and Saba Syed Razvi for selecting this collection, and again to Holly for being a strong poetic inspiration even before this selection. Thank you to proofreaders Sydney Richardson and Elliot Brooks for their diligent attention to making these poems the best they can be.
* * *
Thank you, reader—not only for reading this, but for diving into the starlight pool of verse at all. Thank you for resting your eyes here.
Author’s Note
In mid-2018, I once submitted to one of my favorite science fiction and fantasy magazines a poem I had written mostly on a lark—a semi-comic juxtaposition between the weird, surreal, often hostile relationship the media has with one particular musician and actor, and the similarly weird, surreal, hostile lens through which one of science fiction’s most beloved mythologies would view that same person based solely on their body. To be quite honest, the poem was a very sudden thing, the stuff of poetic genius that wiser artists remark on—or wiser poets warn you against—all the time. I had written it months before almost as an experiment. In that year, I had read it aloud only once. Beyond that, I hadn’t thought about that poem much more that day.
* * *
Four months later, accountant Botham Jean was shot dead in his apartment by a Dallas Police Department patrol officer who came off the wrong floor in her apartment building. She found a non-threatening, surely afraid Jean, in his own living room, eating ice cream, not expecting to face a police-issue pistol that evening, and she took his life for alleged fear of her own.
* * *
This juxtaposition surely means very little to most. Sadly, a death of a Black person by extrajudicial police violence seems to be a punctuating event in the international calendar—even if you can’t set your watch to it, you know where you were when it happened, its relation in time to other moments in your life. I am not an American citizen, but things stood out to me regardless: he was born in the Caribbean, a St. Lucian citizen; he was only a few years younger than me, an accountant with one of the States’ most popular firms. In short, in a lot of the ways many other Black people point out that someone has worked very hard to not deserve this kind of violence, it still visited Jean at a moment he could not prepare for.
One of science fiction’s most well-known authors has a history in his work of devaluing and denigrating people of colour.
* * *
We don’t need to go into the details. I suspect that you know. If you’ve gotten this far in the collection, at least you can proffer a guess. It obviously wasn’t his claim to fame—he was an otherwise talented and creative hand in the genre, and we credit him on the expansion of an entire subgenre mythos that science fantasy and horror still reveres to this day.
* * *
The conversation is a challenging, bitter thing: it would be utterly dishonest to say that the creator in question hasn’t had a strong, indelible effect on the genre, and yet that effect is shaped by an undeniable, hostile fear. Far wiser persons have already observed how the core themes of the Cthulhu mythos—of unfathomable knowledge rendering mortals catatonic with fear and madness as they gaze upon creatures they can barely use words to define—share so much, at least superficially, with the same mindset that powers old-school racial discrimination—a fear of the unknown, a suspicion of the intentions of others, and a misguided feeling of superiority. Hell, the name that the creator in question (or one of his parents) gave to his childhood pet cat is a silently repeated meme on social media as we speak.
* * *
Does it bear repeating that the caliber of racism he espoused in his heyday of the 1910s to 1930s was not uncommon among white Americans? Of course—but it would be a sorry excuse, as if to imply racism was some unavoidable product of circumstance rather than the deliberate ideology of spiteful people, some of whom may be honestly otherwise remarkable (much to the benefit of that spite). There is no shame or cruelty in observing this. He was a truly remarkable creative mind, but one whose creativity was colored by a misguided value of monoculturalism.
* * *
Science fiction is a radical genre, but that fact is a neutral one. It has the capacity to unlock the anxieties of today and cast them back to us through a myriad of lenses, some so clinical and precise that the tiniest flecks of complexity appear in sharp relief, others so comically absurd that as you watch you cannot help but ask aloud, “do we really behave like that? Damn. That’s… weird, isn’t it?” Sometimes the thing you see on the other end of that lens is that we think that we mean so much to the universe, are so rare and special to it, that we would never be able to deal with the fact that we are truly so insignificant that leviathans larger than our philosophy are acting out their own strange drama without even noticing that we’re there, too small to them to even be pests.
* * *
But in there is an even more interesting counterpoint: sometimes the lens shows us that there are creatures—people—who think themselves so perfect and incontrovertible in the face of something so small and seemingly worthless that they never notice exactly how resourceful, how resilient, and how significant we
may be.
In mid-2016, the experimental hip hop group clipping. released their second studio album, Splendor & Misery. Just under a year later, it was nominated for a Hugo Award in the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category, although it sadly didn’t win. It is one of only three music records to be nominated for a Dramatic Presentation Hugo in the history of the overall category, and the first time a recorded album had been so nominated since 1971. Two such nominations are theirs—in 2018, the band would score another such nomination for their single ‘The Deep’.
Can You Sign My Tentacle? Page 4