Two Poems
AMERICA, I AM
I come from the kidnapped,
the assaulted--
my country tis of reparations as in-store credit
backordered to bankruptcy
It is me & my trophy wife
passing as a dream of some kind
All I want is 40 dead mules
& an acre of land w/ a lighthouse
right above the porch
of the great Atlantic ocean
just in case any of my ancestors tasted nasty & made it.
I come from a people who pay a penalty every sunrise
& divinate to paroled gods with rancid hog maws.
The stripes plowed into my grandfather's back
will have to stand in for our family album.
Somebody threw some stars at my grand-momma's head
& said ‘betcha won't ask for freedom no mo'!
Natives in prison issue war bonnets tell me:
I come from a poisoned land that recycles children
into artillery shells
& where dark skin is good as
an invisibility cloak
until the police arrive.
I am proud to be a ___________
where I can hold my head up and drown
in the downpour of state sanctioned cancer.
I am proud to hold my place
in back of the line.
I come from a land that's open all night
like a shotgun wound.
& as for yawl tired,
yawl poor
yawl huddled masses
yearning to breathe free
Fuck yawl!
I come from a place promising
a burning cross in every yard
& two meth labs in every garage
& when I say: meth lab, I mean golden
retrievers smoking crank.
The country I come from
I can flash all its gang signs
& beatbox all their anthems.
I come from a place—
actually, I don't know where I come from
I just know I woke up here.
My babies were gone
my house was on fire
& I couldn't breathe.
HER MAJESTY QUEEN SOPHIE
(After artist Mary Sibane)
Her Majesty Queen Sophie
ordained beneath a halo of empyreal elements
Created herself from herself
Every particle hair thread in phototropic dance
Her aura of elemental beads and bracelets
feathered, lured, baited with lavender
Right eye sun Left eye moon Third eye Horus
Attuned Atoned A crystal microphone
A golden triangle, sacred and immortal
Her rainforest of locks powerlines transmitting spirit
Gospel mouth seeding black puddling earth
With fertile ululations
Her first praise song
A rain-bowing sail unfolding midair
colors from her throat ripening
into their own weight and logic.
Her Majesty Queen Sophie
did not bother with Adam or Eve
instead roasted a root ball
that opened, steaming, into family,
the poured foundation to a pyramid of divinity.
Her Majesty Queen Sophie
had a premonition --
She saw a fatally wounded country
headless, hemorrhaging multitudes
chained for sale, cutting swaths thru
the desert,
a collapsing landscape trembling with greed.
She saw the silky fabric of the ocean
fevered, jellied with blood
chanting unfinished prayers
in its foaming mouth.
She saw shamen toss a murmuration of sankofa birds
towards a chalkboard sky
becoming notes on sheets of sacred vapor only she could read.
She saw a flotilla of vessels like wedding cakes
bloated with spectral bridegrooms
as death offered its ceremonial benediction
before jumping its own broom
Her Majesty Queen Sophie screamed livid about the future
She saw land more valued than the orphaned people on it
She wept: There's no appropriate trade for any dead
Then watched ships stumble drunk thru the fog
towards a land of fevered infants screaming
in black bassinets behind a crib-wall of bones
She stepped forward after them
as planets went retrograde, bowing like soldiers
Crossing the threshold of the ocean,
She spread her apron beneath an armada of ships
shedding its dead weight of shadows
In ribbons of crimson bubbles.
Imagine a school of volcanic sparks
too hot to evaporate in the gelatinous
atmosphere of the Atlantic
Come elements! Come assemble!
Let this day turn on divine behavior, she says
waving her purse seiner apron
beneath spirits shaking off their debt to life--
bodies falling in spent casings
She flung them up into the blue black canopy of space
Elevated spirits crocheted into the digital graph of eternity.
A convoy of the disappeared assumed into a corona of stars
This a version of corrective rapture
rapture with purpose
at history's altar
Ending in hovering drones of kente print kofi's as an asteroid field
Each a heart, a hearth, an ancestral campfire
left burning on the porch
to guide kinfolks home.
James Cagney is a published poet and writer from Oakland, CA. He has appeared as a featured poet at venues in Sacramento, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Mumbai. His first book, Black Steel Magnolias in The Hour of Chaos Theory is available now from NomadicPress.org. For more of Cagney's work, visit his blog at https://thedirtyrat.blog/.