The mountaintop is a Black horse
a’throttle in your mother.

Your new haircut brings the Black in closer.
I even leaned forward––––––

How this people’s fire must be reflexed in your teeth!

The nude holograph of an unburdened sex.
These are the common neighborhood things.

I find your car keys in the freezer.
The flocked neighborhoods inside of the train.
I’m either on the train or the train is on me.

The compulsive image of one prefigured violence.

I am the blue eyes at an evening ball.
My father in a ball gown, singing,
Mud is sweeter than money.
I feel this here is no longer sustainable, etc.

A rural scene.
My heart’s in my hand,
‘n’ my hand is pierced, ‘n’ my hand’s in the bag,
‘n’ the bag is caught.
Everybody clap your hands.

In autumn, the sumac is wild.

His hand, her head out, I touch this hand leaping out,
disappearing.

The dog is on the beach.
Time is joyriding past, windows down.
My dog lick paw ‘n’ sea floor
one ‘n’ the same. Everyone his capacity for pleasure
‘n’ afternoon. His body moving in too many modes.

I actualize a Black hand fingers, displacing
a cigarette. I have no ballroom to hold.

The Black truck of our picture
is culminated in a plane of smoke.

‘n’ then she said I need to tell u somethin’, ‘n’ dont hate me for it…

Last night, there was love pandering outside my heart’s door
like jungle music. Who can say what time the cops came?
I guess I mean it confused me,
the way you came hunting, ‘n’ I knew exactly
which Lord would take me.

I thought about being a child,
nothing better, nothing worse.
I thought I could mind-control the situation,

but there was a shark in the water

last night ‘n’ love had fallen out of my body,
had been forcibly ejected.

I had tried to talk to somebody about my mother.
It was like being somebody who doesn’t have anybody.

Over ‘n’ over, I had to ask myself about the words I was using
‘n’ if those words were, in fact, killing people.

I have waited all my breath to find me find you
perched around my Black neck in repose

songing of me in repose your Black legs
songing of me in repose

your Black legs a dangle around me I have waited
to find you find your Black toes to find them

sundering at the base your Black toes your Black toe-
nails hale ‘n’ bright your Black feet a straddle around me

around your Black waist a straddle I finding I
was born I was born who operated

in the white was born who was born
who operated in the white chapel

who found your Black thighs in repose
songing to each other in repose across

your chest an extended Black for blocks
a neighborhood song in repose

your crotch an extended Black
at our neck your Black groin a straddle

around me in repose what breath what
there it is there I had been looked at

there o Lord sucked His Black
thorax which spanned as a fracture spanned as I

who grow up in you there as a fracture find
our Black breast o Lord quiescing

atop your head your other Black
breast o Lord hale ‘n’ bright around me o Lord

a pendulum o Lord to your Black ear
your Black ear that finds you songing

of me in repose in your stature
toppling to one side of your one side

find your Black shoulders a gaping
around me death your capacity for pleasure emptied

around me death none can
skirt it in your mother's way o Lord

is finding Black fingers there your Black
neck is finding Lord is rising past

the cumulus-line an extended Black
o Lord is an extended Black o Lord

is thinking of self ‘n’ thinking of self is
finding you there so that when I entered I entered
the pulpit I entered.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the just-released book I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at Bennington College, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.