Weave Movement In Suns.
More. much better.
better properly.
Evening Praying (your lands language was)
Amen. Thank you.
Hear Reason’s Reunion: Hand.
Interpreter hand. Home handed all hands
Coming Together.

 Faces.
Years Section You Up.
“No, I want you to stand up.”
Assistants Applaud Africa.
weak dancing.
Leadings? Table Them.
Dormant Blessings Derail Us.
World?
Agree Diversity Well. 

Hear Us.
Tasted Was Thank You.
Silence Was Well.

The words in this poem were taken from an address by Robin Mohr to Quakers gathered for a Friends World Committee for Consultation Section of the Americas meeting. Her message was translated into Spanish simultaneously. After each word in this poem Robin paused to let the translators work.

Chicago to Las Vegas dates unknown.
Eavesdropping on someone else’s road trip.
It was America, is America, it will be America.

“I guess we solved The Free-will Question. (No)”
Hypothetical disillusionment—the Freeway makes monks out of men. It’s good, when it’s good to be wrong.

“Tiny bladder”
16oz every meal—It became an issue.
Stiff joints, playing Fight Club in the Super 8 sleep.

“What’s the closest airport?”
There is a fairground, and a strip
Where planes take off to spray the patchwork quilt.

“Little fuckers over in What Cheer, Iowa.”
Exit 201 begged to be taken. Population: 678.
Some towns have only known hard times. What did you expect?

“Yes, but at least we’d never have a reason to see her again.”
Women get easy to resent out here. Mile 937—don’t look
At the burning crash. Forget to call on your mother’s Birthday. 

“Oh I’d say another two or three miles.”
Tiny bladder. The country hangs along
Interstate 80, a cheap charm bracelet.

“What would Jesse do?”
In Bountiful, Utah did you piss in Salt Lake?
Take off your clothes but don’t want to get wet.

 
“I’m still a guy.”
Comfort in the 3am silence— it’s not about passing.
Nod to the U-Haul speeding in the right lane.

“What is cold and wet down the back of my shorts?”
Tiny bladder. Crazy straws and watered down whiskey.
Barely any rest stops past Des Moines.

 
“Tie the kids to the back of the limousine.”
What would you name them?
One night stands with funny labels. 

“Gunpowder and lead (lace)”
And leather. Every station is The Best Country Music.
They love it in South Africa too—something about the slide guitar.

“Boomtime.”
Will you father miss his police scanner?
Roll down the windows so the smoke falls out. 

“The Virgin River: because it runs just fast enough”
Utah, Arizona, Nevada. Into the Colorado
Where it slows. What did you gain in these mountains?

“Your family and their fucking gum”
All these fat and shiny memories. Deep fried things.
Gum sticks, but you’re growing up, moving on. You found the road.

“Next time we know how to have fun on a trip,
We just go to a restaurant then hangout
In the parking lot taking Boomtime pictures.”

All text in quotes was found scribbled down on the last page of my father's Rand MacNally Road Atlas.

The conquerors
keep easy
kinds of records—
that make it easy
for history to stay on the surface
just scratching at the paper trail.

I take solace in archeology.

 
As children
The conquerors—they
went to see the fossilized
dinosaurs foot prints on the banks
of the ancient river. It left such an impression.
And so they stomp heavy
in fear of immortality.
Hoping to invade it
but unlike the dinosaurs.

I take solace in extinction.
 

In their last will and testament
they request tall headstones,
afraid of their shadows
disappearing when they do.

I take solace in electric lights of citizenship shining up from below.

I was trying to write a paper about Mimi Sheller’s brilliant book on Haitian history making and resistance to colonialism.

Echoes of Tuskegee

I have a confession:

I wore blue latex gloves,
walked linoleum hallway from triage and
in the early California morning,
under doctor’s lax direction I
saved a woman’s life.

She was still alive
at least
when my shift ended.

I am not proud;
I am terrified.
of what it means to owe someone
nothing after the night shift turns in.
Of what it means to research amateur
on a stranger’s body
and never to say

“May I”
or “Thank you.”

Haunting me:

Alabama haunts
from the thirties to the seventies.
For 40 years The Tuskegee
Institute kept black bodies
in petri dish
share crop quarters
growing cultures of medical atrocity
—growing cultures of “progress.”

Brought to us
by Racialized front lines.

History has mouthfuls that
I don’t know how to talk about and
when I try to swallow—
I cut up my throat.

I should bleed out lab rats.
I should bleed out syphilitic sores grown on black bodies after science had a cure.
I should bleed out their children; sick by birthright.
I should bleed when surviving means breathing, but does not mean life.

My platelets—my whiteness
scab over like mercury and
underneath these seamless scars
we have not changed—

growing sores
on black bodies
after science had a cure.

Everything is syphilis,
from night stick, to
achievement gap, prison
bars, dreams unspoken,
fish tank overpass,
Martin, Garner, Ferguson.

There is no consent in social experimentation.
So how can I condescend to ask for consent?

I want to apologize:

Woman,
You are probably dead by now.
You were maybe 40.
The Paramedics said you had overdosed on something.
You were unconscious when they found your body.

Your body.
I am sorry.

I know you had a life and
a story and
loved ones who remember you.

I know that your death is not a lesson and
I must learn to be better. 

I do not know your name.

I am sorry.

I know how your naked body fell
across the hospital cot
in coma humiliation.

 The doctor asked me if I wanted to practice CPR and
I didn’t say, “How is this practice?”

Your breasts spilling
milk over asphalt
away from my fists and
I didn’t cry, but
I should have.

I know how your broken breastbone clicks
in and out as I pump your limping heart.

 I know how half opened eyes roll back and
can’t make contact and
I don’t know how to tell you:

“Stay with me now.”

You were never here with me. 
Separate lives—separate lessons.

Did you had learn how to be victimized while I
was learning how to rape.

 Woman,

Yes, your heart began to beat again
as I beat your chest.
I do not know how long
you survived after that—
brain dead and pale blue-black
on the cot. 

I know there is nothing right
about living or dying
surrounded by white coat
strangers singing “Staying Alive”
by the Bee Gees
in bar room cacophony,
so a scared little white girl
can learn how
to keep the beat
on your still
breaking
heart. 

I know the Tuskegee experiments
—echoes themselves—
echo through the Nation.

I say:

“I am sorry,” and
I cry and
pick my scabs.

Which will never be enough and
is also not nothing.

Some notes on my experience during a night shift in the Fresno E.R. 

5.

The grieving child is of godlessness. When I was a child I thought as a child, hit and swung like a child. You were golden also. And death was death even so. La-la la-la. We sing over the stillness of our tongue. Quiver-timber-lungs. Laudanum: the traffic lights of _|_ and the tingling spiny gullet. We were tired then too —we were loosing lost things slower than pitch drips. The tears of a mourning child, a pinwheel legged boy with mangos like hands. Hold him till he goes limp to logic and crying like you. Just in & out.

My mother always sounds like she is about to weep.
Her students nod.
Mirrors mirror film.
Spinning
was a metaphor for telling.
She speaks
by jumping off the edge of thinking deeply.
Walt erased all the spinning mothers.
Who does the telling anyway?

Mother,
it’s a man’s world.
We held the apple in our hands and it filled with poison
It is called faulty pedagogy.
You teach about children,
so you know.
I absorb you
—with all your flaws.
You watch.
What is foreshadowing for, now that all the stories have been told?
My brother—
my father—
you,
raspberry prologues into my belly.

 Hold me like newborn ears,
because the world whispers soft and incessant.
Tell me a new story now.
No place for jealousy.
No motive but love.

I like to go to my mother's lectures even though she says it makes her do a lousy job.

(you remember fighting)
oh god!
wouldn't it be like dying?
paranoia
in a small boat.
you showed me a minefield
and told me how
you walked across it
every morning
on the way to doing
the things you love.

 
(you remember fear)
you had a lover once
a few steps ahead
with heartbeat
like steamroller
and diamond colored eyes:
just as
sure—just as
sharp. 
and when he was blown
up
you grew love letters
from the dirt
under your fingernails
and you cried
but did not visit him in jail.


(you remember defeat)
And you stopped
doing the things you loved.  
and you don't
check out books
from the library anymore.
you took a job at McDonald's,
and you fell off
out of the sky.

 
(you remember a future)
And now you tell me
what the turning of the century
did to us
you tell me a story
about this paranoia
that shattered your bones.
about a quiet
McCarthy era,
unobtrusive
Secret Service
Tapings
of maple trees
and revolution sugar
flowing out
on to the ground.

The repression experienced by US activists in the early 2000s is so seldom talked about. The paranoia and silence that was provoked during the Bush presidency drove many in to anonymity, splintering activist groups and Intimidating folks into disassociation from their friends taken as political prisoners.