Read an Excerpt
who
I, the narrator, author, distant&safe&born in the diaspora
we, the living
you, unless stated otherwise, the dead
the sea, also a “you,” talkless “witness,” body of water, body of bodies
the Luams, there are four Luams. One Luam is nine years old, she is the sister of Abram, Alexander Pushkin’s great-grandfather, who was kidnapped, sold into slavery,&given as “a gift” to Peter the Great in the early 1700s, it is said that Luam drowned or died at sea, here she is also a fish, or the dead; one Luam is 36 years old, she was born in Asmera, Eritrea but now lives in Umbertide, Italy, outside of Perugia, where it is idyllic&quiet,&she cleans
houses there; one Luam is 36 years old&lives in New York City, where she teaches school&collects paper that she then turns into portraits,&she was born in the United States; one Luam is 36&lives in Asmera where she is a nurse at the hospital. Luam means “peaceful”&“restful” in Tigrinya.
the flies, the word “angel” has come to English from the Latin “angelus”&the Greek “angelos” which mean “messenger, envoy, one that announces.” The Old English word for it was “aerendgast” which means “errand-spirit.” For the Luams there are no angels, only flies.
About the flies the Luams say: The fly is bright&working. It carries the messages of hunger&the sentences of the wound. It cannot carry the message without, itself, being touched. The fly whose hands&feet touch death, bring death to where it lands. Out of doors, it carries the history of the wound,disobeying the locks on doors&screens. The flies, they are the honest who know their history&take it everywhere.
Romare’s Odysseus, after the legendary king of the Odyssey epic, Odysseus was famous for the ten years it took for him to return home after the Trojan War. Romare Bearden painted&collaged this Odysseus as a black man in the Black Odyssey cycle which concerned black travelers on their way to&from home
when
1702, 1530, 2013, 1781, 2014
“Still, all the history of the world
happens at once.” –Jean Valentine, from “Then Abraham”
where
New York City, one of the largest natural harbors in the world. Before colonization, New York was an area of land inhabited by Algonquian speaking First Nation tribes, it was since colonized by the Dutch, Portuguese,&British. Today, it is the most linguistically diverse city in the world,&the most populous city in the United States. Along with London&Tokyo, it is one of the three “command centers” of the world economy.
Umbertide, a small Italian town in Umbria, not far from Perugia.
Asmera, the capital of Eritrea, was part of a medieval kingdom called the Medri Bahri, or Land-Sea/ Sea Land. Evidence suggests the city’s origins trace back to 800-400 BC. Asmera was under Italian occupation from 1897-1941,&under British occupation from 1941-1952, after which Eritrea was “federated to” Ethiopia, making the new capital Addis Ababa. In 1959, Ethiopian authorities introduced an edict which established the compulsory teaching of Amharic (the language of Ethiopia’s ruling class) in all Eritrean schools. In 1962, under Emperor Haile Selassie’s rule, Eritrea was officially adopted as Ethiopia’s 14th province. Between 1959-62, an Eritrean independence movement began to form which turned into a 30-year war for independence that was won in 1991. Theoretically the state is a unicameral parliamentary democracy, but the president, Isaias Afwerki, has been in office since independence. National elections have not been held since independence, over 20 years ago.
the Mediterranean Sea
the Red Sea
the Caribbean Sea
the Atlantic Ocean
the Afterworld Sea/ Sea of Death
any Sea
//
prayer&letter to the dead
Let me plead with you, please,
while the room is still dry here,
while the page is still
white, still here,
more shore than sea, more still
than alive, while the air is now
touching the dark&funny fruit of
your eyes where it is quiet enough
for me to hear the small sigh
of your shoes lift up into
the old&broken boat,
while the small hands of water
wave, each one waving
its blue handkerchief, then
the gentle flutter of luck
& tears. We all know
what happens next. Do not go.
But if you must,
risking what you will, then,
in a language that is my first
but not your first,&with what I know
& do not know, I will try to build
a shore for you here, a landing place.
Here the paper dreams that you will last.
Each word is a word that floats
atop the white silence of the sea.
Every day I go out wishing
a poem were more than a poem.
I am not a president or, even,
a mayor, but here,
here I can make the air
bloom gently without event
beneath the blue boat
of your escape.
//
The sea delivers
your letters, the reams of paper,
the ink&messages
& shells telling us “goodbye.”
Goodbye, you say,
to them, to that, goodbye,
to the city in which for lunch, for dinner,
we ate the moon, its theater of faces,
its sweater factory, the cathedral
bells ringing stoically above a fit of sparrows,
the cafes whose doorways seem to weep, now,
with the red&amber weeping of beaded curtains through which
the months blow in&out, invisibly
as months, as old men.
Goodbye your somewhere where
the President stands in uniform
wearing a peacock, pinned-alive,
to his chest. Through
his binoculars he sees this&that, approving, disapproving.
He does not understand the degrees of love.
The difference between your love for country
& your love for him. His memory has long skin, it counts
the invasions, the factories&ports&rails.
Each British motor. Each Italian nail.
Each machine that was built,
then dismantled by
the Allied Forces of the great
& “moral” war.
The majority of white rest, it is true,
is the result of black sorrow, brown sorrow,
so you build walls&army. You have a point.
But again we are the killed&stoic.
Let it end,
we plea from
the distance, Let it end.
//
But the President
& his long memory, they think they know
better. They order the children. They cut the news
& power. They decorate the country with
paper offices&send the young
to forever-service where they carry guns
& patrol the streets&Badme
& the borders cut sloppily as beginner’s cloth.
The distant ugly sharpen their knives
& look greedily on, in wait.
You, cousins, are the children of the ones who stayed.
No one has to tell you about commitment,
about love, you who grew beneath
the eucalyptus trees
& the grey faces of the martyrs
framed on the bedroom wall.
There are your aunts, your uncles.
The coffin-eye static of the photograph holds
your mother, your elder,
your one. You wanted
to live, to study&to make
things. To be free. In a war-land
the birds all sing
the saddest songs
of people who will not write poems
about their feathers or learn their calls&names,
so busy are they waiting for news
& burying their dead.
//
What world is this,
my world, your world
of longtoothed hoodlums holding the guns
to your heads, breaking your cervixes&bones
while the rest of us light our candles&buy lipsticks.
How is anything able to grow as we theorize about purity&rhetoric?
Italy, Israel, my United States
of blood-laws&carmine, always preserving
always looking back into the faces of
“our fathers,” policing the map
of a mouthless land. My countries of genocide,
how they implicate the wounded with
their simple gifts, loaning us
sneakers&loaning us meat
until we have filled our homes
with this&that,&to our deaths
amass&amass.
