Читать книгу Waterbaby - Nikki Wallschlaeger - Страница 9

for Wanda Coleman (1946–2013)

A word is an old story. One word, many stories,

one body, many bodies. To this day they move

across our line break lives & before we are

archived, lungs crackle with smoke until words

form in the long struggle smuggled on impact,

a thunderstorm bites & my world is a prayer

with a moon & all the birds from way back but

my throat is a blue cache of contraband winds,

when it’s brutal please help keep our language

thriving on big mama river is the word maroon.

Forbidden trees storages of lives pressed page

flowers herbs in their barbarian jailships on the

horizon bones shake with births & coughing,

keeping it down catching sick on the landform.

In life I live in the cold foliage of their unreason,

walking pneumonia drowned stories struggle,

silent memoirs, the cooking stoves are loaded

on the horizons cargo & people to this day

they run the sea months mouths housetraps.

Tearin the roof off this cold cruel mothafucka

outside the towers of excess is fluid smoking,

language tundra rumbling running ear nose

& throats tarsus tomes winking out of their

power plants, good & plenty different worlds

tearjerkers crybabies they got no memories

of their own cruelty waterlogged lifesickness.

To cry so hard is to laugh to laugh so hard

is to cry writing with the smoke is the word,

is an old story of our lives of the horizons in my

mouth, I bite the stories that drowned me in

their books with a moon & our real stories.

We live within the fugitivity of a thunderstorm,

lung-red caches formed from struggle from

walking from counting the siq seas mouthing

directions the language cargo of Black code.

We got all the words for how we got here,

where we are going & how we will get there.