Miatta Kawinzi

R / B (Are, Be)
let’s be metal rebirthed, be the sound of day in breaking, bodies in mend
let’s be electric, the kind of currents both sea-deep & star-flung, be heat
let’s absorb the heat, be all colors, the sound of world in forming, slippery speech &
constant invention, the ability to make room from corners.

let’s be echoes, be glint, be sly, mirrored & looking, soundwaves and masquerades.
let’s be new, pay homage to erasure in noting its weight, be wing
let’s craft new ways of speaking from the pauses in the concrete, watch the way in
which roots are undeterred by that which is manmade, be chameleons of form &
warmth
let’s be breakbeats when the sun was amazed at their freshness, be spacetalk when all
anyone knew was Earth.

let’s be a forgetting & a remembrance simultaneously, be a contradiction that struts
its strange nature across borders dissolving of name & claim. weeping willow
reaching willow.
let’s be – an acceptance rather than a resignation, a clever pushing into occupancy
where only vacancy was thought to exist
let’s be code & key & gentle thrillings, reverb of millennia, existence drummed to
cacophony of continuance.

words&worlds in waiting then in static cling, the weightlessness of everything
let’s shout our truth, then whisper it. give room for both careful listening & sideways
glances, for agreements & thatwhichwillnotleavethehead
let’s be mental, then corporeal, then ethereal. ephemera of the wishbone strung
through space & tethered.
then freed.

let’s be free.

by now let us be free. if it means a leap from rooftop let it be so. for no longer is the
ground construed as solid.
yes, let us be shapeshifters, inhabiting settings culled into being by the pin of dream.
let’s be space, then corner, then sky. let’s be failings, calculated recoverings, and
clutched successes. let’s be varied.
we are varied.
let’s be.

(the garment restricts;
We adjust.)

CAUTION: [BURIED POWER]
my shadow glanced at me sideways, thinking.
i said “do not be afraid to ask,” she nodded, knelt, pushed misgivings out of
her hands and on to the table before her.
i waited.
she sighed, that decade-old sigh, the same expelling of air done by our mothers
and our mothers’ mothers’ and she said, alas,
“can there be poetry in the machine?”

i considered
if there was resonance, internal spark, to these wires at which we daily paw,
if maybe they think the body will soon be irrelevant, too soft for a mechanized
world,
they say car parts are more reliable. but there was something unspoken in the
question, too,
something of the symmetry in computer chips, or how what is essential is not
always seen.
if there is poetry in the machine, it is at the very center, buried, able to emerge
only at the machine’s combustion, waiting as swallowed words wait, as cut bark
waits to fall again to earth, as the mother waits at the county court, early,
waiting.

[IN THA NITE]
can we talk about life,
how it drips apathetic sometimes from nights of

deepest hue,
how sometimes the well of Being cannot wrap

itself around the need of Everyone
can we talk about life,
how long tracts of Needing & Strife
do not dissolve in one night of dancemusic
can we talk about grace,
how it is not a feeling springing up only in

strands of triumph but also in the
arc of uncertainty,
how our small human selves seek to condense

waves into water droplets,
what use there is in uphill battles,
pain that takes shape in letter form.
can we talk about life,
this indecipherable creature whole centuries in

forming,
in glimpsing. can we talk about
talking. or maybe we do that too much already,
talking. human breath. can we talk about
can —
can we talk about breath that is not

preplanned,
all the
Everything.
i do not seek to define myself in opposition.
there is Also
Recognition.
. . .

“It was everything, once.”

Truff ;

Those of us who write from the margins, make the margins into text, white
space now black,
The margins into space, space into form,
How do you represent a person? Must it be in flowery descriptions whole
paragraphs to utter?
How do you circumscribe a glimpse? I was not in the footnotes and so I put
my foot in the notes;
Does space have a color does the color mean something do you notice white
space but not black space do you straddle the line
Are you a trespasser bordercrosser do you have documentation for these
movements into which you shift your person?

There is a woman in the margins but I was told she must be white
There is a black figure in the margins, a shape in the suggestion of a body, a
gender I can not easily decipher and so perhaps they do not exist
This categorization is clean
You were unanticipated, baby; go home
Here you cannot be hosted
You got some glare on you, some light reflected in this space and I do not
think they can see you

They were unanticipated.

I want to redeem you from the lines determined to determine you
I want to at least bring you back into the space they hurled you out of, saw you
shrieking confused and wanting, saw you holding on to that space until they
pulled back your fingers singularly, snarling; What makes you think you deserve
this space?
While the audience was distracted by the glow of whiteness, one of us
sweeping the floor from behind, one of us disembodied voice a rollicking roll,
announcing her entrance – Mrs. X – and the audience was distracted, and
they did not notice the quiet struggle of Black being swept from the stage
definitively, a new protocol for performance, this stage home to something that
can easily be recognized,

They forgot about the bodies nestled between worlds.

Put black body back
Let black body be

I want to know what happens in the moments between skin
Breathe in the space between male and female,
Between Black and Black
How do you walk this line: in heels
barefoot
muddy
flat footed
as if merely standing
with sway
with swagger,
under the mask of night?
How do you sing when History is wedged between the folds of the throat,
Hold your head high when weighed with dust-marks of the judging gaze?

Say there is not space within the text,
say you crawl out of it, say you curl within the margins, say the space is
unoccupied, say the space becomes you – you who were too wide to rest simply
within letters stark in contrast
But do you exist if no one recognizes you – who among us is searching for the
unseen?

I can’t do this t’ing
The Black body surfacing from spaces in-between
I slip tr’u
The Black body afloat on the sliver of a hope to be recognized

How to

be?

The Black body occupying space.

My fact is your fiction.

The Black body brave.

Copyright © Miatta Kawinzi