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| Astrakhandescence Is it Astrakhan where you will wash your hair with juice of chokecherries the clouds make way to let you comb them through, or is it elderberries or apricot nectar or oil of spanish olives December bald and running beaded chandeliers through your hair strung from spools you unwind like coded Moorish carpets or Volga river stories unknit to snicker and sigh into prayer-rug strands, expire the instant they are told A city like no other rears its neon hieroglyphics around us myriad frequencies flux on medulla oblongatas inciting, forbidding we align ourselves tantrically to the emissions like termite queens to the magnetic ribbons tying up this world her workers punking the hull through with calligraphic tunnels wounds you will salve with gum arabic that rare curse of kindness spreads in you like forests like infernos in forests Suddenly you exclaim: This calamity soon must end! it is safe only here, nobly destitute in our origami canoe upstream from Astrakhan or Samarkand bow splitting the water, your mouth chokecherry, a run off oarlock plays out storied threads of prayer rugs to pilastered afternoon arcades of Marrakech fat rain swizzlestix, sizzlesex your dress unsure if it sucks to skin in magnolia saturnalia droplets or lured inwards by your own sweat magnetics you will wash your hair in slitherdrips waterbeads balm a carpetstripped deck and then swaddle yourself with me in rippled breath and muslin in cultish candelabracadabra a cypher will appear on your lips inked in milk or lemonjuice transmitting into the fever my mouth becomes a hoop, I jump clean through unravel, expire like rivers decoding into seas stories the instant they are told |
In A Dream Anchored near the leprosarium I listen to you sleep, your wounded chirps a recoiling blade slashing through the jungle in your dreams I am helpless to help you Ekimi when you are in there When you are that boy hiding in a stream run rancid with blood breathing through a reed until the village burns down the mutilated day passes into night and the general's butchers fall asleep then cries die away then you can run Years ago the militia's machetes inscribed the African National Anthem on your skin tonight the juddering breath against your ribs changes the cadence of ragged scars to new maps or spells or alphabets Your memory hacking you to pieces your home on fire my fingertips sign slightly upon your brow and all at once from your chirping wounded mouth the sound of all rivers heaving to rest how is it but the annunciation of my name
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