Hell Up in Harlem
A visit to the Studio Museum in Harlem on Mother's Day precipitated this; poetry-as-criticism. Edited by my dear friend Gabe, who I'll be publishing on here soon.
Take the bus to the bus to the train up hunnid and twenty-fifty street, Depart the express community center underground, rejoin the sunlit masses on Adam Clayton Powell’s plaza. Emerge from a city on edge of crisis, Whole Foods next to Trader Joe’s next to street vendors next to sounds of D’Angelo Next to breach in humanity, Break in time, Emerge from before and after, Enter cool obsidian. Take elevator to ancestry. Fake step the security guard, Lock eyes with Locke’s New Negro. Focus on foreign funk familiar, overwhelm representations of black with recollection of meaning Surround images with interpretation Sculptures with sublimation semiotics Biologic Until image welcomes subdural identification, Until finding inescapable that
you are
your people.
well, you and they are and are not the same, but they the only folks who held you when the apocalypse came, who stood with you in the rain as bombs parade over world trade. Find the ones you sold, dishonored, distorted, betrayed, turning back towards you with open arms,
Holding up the world.
Resonating borders and chain link fortress with frequencies unheard,
unfound and unbound since Jericho.
Inhabiting genres of performance they were not placed in, were abjected to sanction, rewrote personhood to conjure/ conjuncture the hush harbor in the back room, the bed room. Re-place your cultural connection, as the conjunctions holding up your displacement brace forego disjunction as present trace. Recognize your foolishness.
Lay up under the quilts hung up on the wall.
Join Romare’s jazz troupe playing tunes of discordance,
dazzled disarray, declension.
Dana warns you to check out yo’ mind,
Wadsworth’s words compose worlds of revolution,
Lorraine lavishes the ones you love to forget with attention;
Remember Echoes of afterlife. demonstrate disturbance and define death, foreclose ownership, steward its wake. Entropy guides decay and riots re-christen life and rights to said city realized by black power, black acquiescence, black indecency, black blacking out the black marks, red lines, racist re-marks blotted to blank out black neighborhoods, black out your mind. Come home. it’s hell up in harlem, so greet the devil in the details, the demons who made possible, the family before family who remembered you before you were born. Saidiya said they/we lost their/our mothers at Elmina; Your mother? Lost, too. left you. Couldn’t hold you. Wouldn’t let you. So you Find another.