I once answered a phone call & my father told me to hand it over to his son:
a way to decolonize me. to say, fluent as you speak, I have no stomach for accent.
to say, can I still trust you with the language of your birth?
where I’m from, people bend like a keeled over font /ə/ to show respect.
when someone suffers in phonetics, they reach for a symbol & make a prison of it.
the slashes barricading both sides to make the sorrow important.
& aren’t we all jailed signs, stuck in a trap called America in this trap of a world.
I back up this claim with the many incarceration of blacks,
with the cage of my locked-up jaw built like a cell room.
we identify as closeted—which means, concealing more than gender.
our private bodies/ held together/ as hostages,
folded inside out & tucked into a manhole of letters.
legs, bent over in italics like props for Beethoven’s music.
& aren’t we all destined for percussion: to collide on everything
with the noise of our bodies, so much that it feels like singing.
in the beginning, someone picked a rhythm from the frozen bones of Jocko Graves,
& made us in the image & likeness of his sound.
our cold submission in between a wooden box, rooted in his allegiance to silence.
when I play dead in the first-person, all my deads became the first persons to yank me
from the ground, because my pronouns isn’t befitting enough for a burial.
I am they/them in all the ways that is set up for slaughter:
endangered specie for the gram & nothing else.
the black of me meeting the white between Creole & French.
I am raised in a vernacular that pays homage to grief & the unceded land of self.
the many acres of the body we held against colonial invasion.
I once left a bracket open without the lettered body of me in between
& someone calls it an invitation to trespass without consent.
left my hair to grow dreads & a white loctician seeks to cut down the bushy existence of me.
I move around the forest of myself, marveled by a privilege to stay twisted & unkempt.
isn’t race too, a plot twist like that—where the violence turns on its own head,
becomes the strange dread I wear to the grave.
the water body beneath me, combing the negritude to satisfaction.
thickets of black hair strands, stuck to the root of the ground like walnut covering.
the language of kernels its dry bark, a hard nut to crack.
I let out a dry bark first, to showcase my vernacular the next time my father calls me,
hurled that language like a rope & Tarzan my way back into his cold heart.
here, watch as diction manifests into braids to shatter the chest.
see how the invitation of his body causes me to trespass without consent.
same logic that forces the beauty of movement forces us all to be brute.
like, there’s some hidden treasure in the land of a body,
like the field of my person is something to be conquered.