after A Mouth Holds Many Things, a collection of hybridities edited by Dao Strom & Jyothi Natarajan
1 A mouth holds many hauntings.
Mother languages. Daughter languages.
2 The work + play of mothering + daughtering
tongues. The work + play of so many voices.
3 Voices skating across an underland
without a supralight beam, as the supralightbeam.
4 Voices becoming slabs of ancient clay
lapping + wrapping into + around each other.
5 Down here, genres are becoming inseparable as seas.
Here’s a local saying: see the shore, lose the shore.
6 Along evaporated coastlines,
faces are loosening into silent exhales.
7 Minds upturned like battlefields are searching
for some safe edge, or perhaps the safety of no edge.
8 Here’s another practice to play
+ to pray with: Keep one eye made of emptiness.
9 Keep the other eye made
of non-English-speaking soul.
10 At the floating house of the medicine woman,
curtains are thin as autumn’s hair.
10 The divine, they say, is diaphanous.
In spring, her daughters divine their past by staring
9 into the shreds of taro skin shaped into circles
that smell like earth across the old kitchen table.
8 Gradually bits of skin in brown + black
will flicker some sudden notes into the girls’ small ears,
7 archaic notes only children + their mother soil could know how
to receive. In winter, the girls sow + grow their future by drinking
6 their tarot cards. Entire decks are grilled +
powdered + mixed into a peppery plum-flavored tea.
5 The cards ingested make them dream.
Some dream of ghost ships + huge lanterns +
4 ritual flames that set their illness
of a century ablaze.
3 When they awake, still dazed, the children
like to go sit by the front door + with their fingers
2 trace their new shores of wavering health
onto a carpet of fresh embers that their mother,
1 their night fire, has sprinkled around the warm doorsill
before she once again motorcycles away into the day’s cold light.
A Poetics of Sleep #2: the (no) center of writing
blue notes after amara tabor-smith + Omi Joni Jones
Infinite dimensions of writing interfuse at the O, which can be translated as the moon, the seed, the mouth, the bindi, the gourd, the belly, the omelette, the tired curl of the body asleep, all kinds of zero-degree releasements, all manners + mantras of forgetting, all the ways of tracing + saying nothing + everything at the same time. Thus have I heard. Isn’t language this delirious net of ten thousand dewdreams hovering about our eyes, this mantle, this riddle, of lifelong sleep? Isn’t the mother tongue made of ceaseless phantoms? My kind of tongue tends to arise + sink away into a spell of errancies. An errantry or swordswomanship of lyric. Seems I’m sleeptalking again about poetry-sutras that generate + cut through lies. Poet-chanters who wrestle all night long with angel-ancestors + other electric apparitions. Until the morning. Until no mourning nor meaning remains. Until the dawns of cessation. Cessation of what? Of volition + all its aches, maybe that’s what. The mystery upon mystery of a breed of oceanic poets in love with their glowing night seas. Their open enigma stays intact even in the deluge of habitual daylight. From under the careless flutter of sun, who could hear the echoes of the self-transmuted, self-translated poets laughing in the winds, who could hear the quiverings of their soundless dispersal. Here’s a practice game-prayer: Keep one earhole listening for closer, higher vibrations. Keep the other earhole listening for lower, further songs, for everbluer notes. Seems I’m sleeptalking again into a poetry that oozes at the contact point, the blow, where two or more matrices meet. In the jamming + jarring of the fever-dreaminess + the cold factuality, in the intermixing + intermessing of growing + dying, of crying high + whispering low, a kind of feral virtuosity unfurls like a flower that bursts out of the root of the word virtuosity itself, which roughly means to go forth + back, to groove on in the middle of all this vertigo, as if there were nothing more to crave + nothing left to fear.
