Republic Americana

ft. Audre Lorde 

In front of the oiled anatomical heart, its wings hooked.

A plush emerald curtain, drawn. Dragons shouldn’t weep

on a third date in front of inanimate objects, I know, but

nothing is really inanimate in art. Crying love, in tongues

of false thunder. If my body is a nation—and by body I mean

my black queer pussy, it’s phantom and light—is a paperweight

pressing a constitution like a new shirt. Or a constitution, who

like Homer, pushes me from coast to coast until, eventually.

I am thrown from the edge.

Master of Your Make-Believe

ft. Santigold

I.

I spoke into the chamber of myself, and took back the derecho of my name.

II.

The goal then. Supremacy natural. As ritual. Longing a kissed thing. Which supposition.

Exhausted question. Or none. Not if or if that then. Imagination arrogant. With fear. It takes a

village to. Survive and confuse it with. Living. A history hellbent. Erasing. Burning. The state of

nothings. All things. Inference. Blank an unblanked breathing. Snuffed. Made ditch worthy,

suffocated armature. Pressed. Limp. A fact blurred, the lie. The syllogism seared, inescapable.

Can’t body future. Body past participle. Bagged. Typed over. Tinctured. In the molecule. Drink.

Drink. Drunk. Hungover and echoed. Steered into then. Steel of it. Industrial soaked. Thirst.

Fatigue being the only word swelled beneath my tongue, I drank until each bud was plump. Spit-

burst and slurring, I begged the next familiar lover. I am trying to unsee the need to be desired.

Deny this country another glass of wine. I plate a whole bird, slathered in salt and butter. I wear

my good dress and heels, tits perched as high as the crisped, brown breasts of this feast. And

won’t you try to ride me into your horizon of longing? Until the greatness of me is swallowed up

by the receding light? Out there, you keep your ideologies of God alabaster and dew-glistened.

You dream of me. You hate your mouth for its water.

III.

But if we go, we go together.