Solidarity Texts

After Maya Angelou

I.

I am the hope & dream of a slave

slave a of dream & hope the am I

am the hope & dream of a slave

a of dream & hope the am I am

the hope & dream of a slave a of

dream & hope the am I slave a

Conjure Wives, collage on paper, 2017, 8" x 5".

And he sang for me in the Naropa hotel a mourning song his grandmother from rural

Pennsylvania taught him and that he later sang when his boyfriend Earth was killed. He was

thinking of singing it instead of talking about crystals on the panel but then talked about

crystals on the panel we were on together. And she handed me a strawberry from her

Materials: two people clothed in black fitted clothing, no socks, no shoes, hair

must be short or pulled back, a white wall

1. Person A: stand one foot from a white wall, perpendicular to the wall, with
the left side of the body closest to the wall.

1. The spirit of

2. Malice survives

3. The direct exertion

4. Of malice. Give up

5. The desire to be female

6. The whatever being

7. Defined not by what it is

8. And not by what it belongs to

It’s a Post-adolescent apocalyptic conflict

     about masculinity

Using license to kill to tell a story

     of colonialism

The fast forward version of the Process

     of collapse

Some time ago, I must have died. Now I am simply on their spindle.

Or nature gnashes its teeth, chews me, wishes to crack my husk. Of course.

Tenderness is outlawed.

____

They stole the girls to prevent them from reading. From writing. They stole them away from words,
to make them into bodies. Of virgins they could enter like gods. But the girls refused their
annunciations.

Understand the proportion of one letter to another

and of your emotion in proportion to mine; this selfishness

is intolerable! Either side, I deserve better missive, or

an apology the depth of an ocean comprised of centuries

of hurricanes of tears, oceanic sobbing and contrition,