Simone Reid
Aporia 2.0
with a line borrowed from Ray Durem
Beyond anything, it’s an effort to retain my dignity.
Wifredo Lam lived through the Spanish Civil War
blending religion with big round bones and moon faces.
Bright horns. When he returned to the Caribbean
he turned color to dark brown to white horned heads.
This kind of art is a dangerous wound
of colonial discontent. Sometimes we must truly illustrate
the ragged corners of the world.
Our commitments. I saw many blue dark things in
a word for lynch. I saw eyes and arms and lips.
I’m always very afraid of being too loud. I don’t
want to be heard being undone, my trembling chest
untethered in turquoise. Feet that are also hands.
Gloom. I also saw them glad. What’s a lavender word?
My dream is to write the world apart. Unwind it,
sacrifice charm—long undulating limbs and strange
remindings of the full-throated belly of colonialism
turquoise and carrot shaped lips and heads
with art. Santería and Voodoo and winged people
and the Vichy occupation of France.
Aporia 8.0
I am practicing mercy with all the insects this summer
and I hope it will get me into heaven.
Sometimes I see a world where I want it to be true:
retribution and punishment, sacrifice, reward.
You have to look closely to see how everything breathes
everything is small and vulnerable to squashing.
I don't concern myself with the minutiae of American politics.
The real politics is taking hostages, is moving underground
the beat of a butterfly before swelling into the jetstream of a Boeing
bound for Cuba. We have already fought for the right to vote.
It should instead become a question of who’s axe and who’s neck
the white gloss of grief we’ve been made to hold.
Poetry is not simply an intellectual exercise. Become blue.
You have to pull from yourself a deep marine, perhaps in
the bottom of a mug left out over night with the herbs all darkened to ash
and the ants down there, partying with the ashes,
the ants that are disgusting to me, but I have to let them live.
I’m tired of the poetry of deception, those pens filled with cotton.
You also have to cower under the clouds and their excretions.
Catharsis. Is that for me or for you?
Simone Reid (she/they) is a cultural worker from New York. It’s her aim to hijack the written word for our anti-imperialist struggle. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY, Gordon Square Review, Protean Magazine, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU, supported by the Lillian Vernon Fellowship.