Camonghne Felix - Build Yourself a Boat

Box 180165 Chicago, IL 60618 www.haymarketbooks.org ISBN: 978-1-60846-614-6 Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com). This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund. Cover design by Brett Neimann. Im goin look for my body, yeahIll be back like real soon Solange Knowles If ruin was my sole inheritance, and the only certainty the impossibility of recovering the stories of the enslaved, did this make my history tantamount to mourning? Or worse, was it a melancholia I would never be able to overcome? Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your MotherLOST POEM 4: R X The psych on duty in triage Asks me if I want to die, and I say Not at the moment, no, but stay Tuned. I can charm my way out Of anythingincluding his seven-day Suggested stay, those ugly Gray mornings buzzing in infrasound I can save my own life just as easily As I can corrupt compounds of Ripe silence with just a mouth Drown it out of its own sound. CONTOURING THE FLATTENING I try not to tell about the stories still bleeding. CONTOURING THE FLATTENING I try not to tell about the stories still bleeding.

After all, who wishes to lead their own mother to wolves. I try not to mess with the shape of my privilege. I only say what they need to hear. If the they is an us I make myself an example. I lie to keep it all intact. But if I felt I could, I would unstitch this plaque sewn over my mouth.

I would tell you of the seasonal allergies, how my primary doctor warned my mother of dead cockroaches, their eggs, the likelihood of them in my lungs. I would tell of how often wed bomb the house, how Id spend summer nights collecting little brown skeletons in the thousands, every inhale ending in a question of poison. I would tell of the mice that sometimes bit us in our sleep, how the infestation of them violated any concept of domainhow we could not know who the house really belonged to; a house of rodents, or of men but I keep my sob stories to myself. I keep my smile white and my fists closed. I let survival be survival. I grow into the shoe.

I keep the world big and my sanity small. I was almost killed in that water and Ive had a fear ever since.CUTTING W/ JB JBs getting her ass bussed in the other room. We can hear the clap-clap of wet flesh over the whip of the ceiling fan above. The heat in the projects is always on and thick and coming for your edges except for the days when you really need it, when its five degrees with wind chill and Housing wont come fix your broken bedroom window. Its half past midday and by now Im bored enough to maybe consider going back to school but they wont let me in this late in the day anyway, so I have to sit with the decision Ive made. No ones looking for us.

Emmys mom died five weeks ago, so as far as shes concerned, what the fuck is a parent? Ive never had a best friend before. All the books say that when your best friends mama die, you aint got no parents neither. We spend our days in patient wanderlust, living off sheer probability in a series of cheap, rancid thrills. IMAGINE??? MY SISTER AN ASTRONAUT??? When she was small I couldnt see her I held her hand in tendered obligation fed her because she was hungry slapped her because she spoke one day she stole my underwear I climbed to the top of our bunk beds my waist a cradle over hers my fists a marsh of dead moons shadowing her little face after two taps I felt the monstrosity of my putrid desires flatten my intrinsic knowings suddenly afraid to bruise the small genius the strange foreign god of sisterhood it was then I knew I loved her something bad shes off to college going to study some aerospace biomedical nanoscience shit some shit only white people think to study because access is a frame of reference an organizing principle in the family group chat she sweats us out with her excitement about next semester and 8 a.m. trig in high school I failed everything graduated with underwhelming decimals the dark trauma of men lining my transcript but baby girl has got something I dont its called discipline and it moves her through the world slow and deliberate all the night a platform all the trains just stations away shes off to space camp in a few weeks and so fucking casual about it I say, hey maybe you should be an astronaut yea, thinking about it as if it were a breakfast burrito or mommys oxtail my girl my young knight driving a needle through the inflated boundaries of ambiguous sciences I think shiiiiiiit imagine?? My sister an astronaut??? lineage narrated through the brat of my heart into the prodigious stuff of the stars towering in bigness bigger than you and you and you and you and you. GOOGLE SEARCH KEYWORDS: blood; in; underwear kids; having; sex cousin; love incest; what; is what; is; molest what; is; rape how; to; know rape; cousin; loves; cousin incest; what; is how; to; die; on; purpose how; to; tie; noose how; to; starve how; many; Tylenol Thirty; Tylenol? Seventy-Five; Tylenol? how; to; get; blood; out kid; raping; kid Anyways, I always kept telling you all that I cant swim.THINGS THE BLOCK TAUGHT ME Lesson 1: Finish The Job.

When Tasha died, we figured that she had been zippered open neck first like a spayed swan. I am fourteen. I am only as large as my fists. I am being introduced to the bold swagger of knuckle to bone. Its a drug. A girl curls under the drag of my left hook.

I am only as large as my fists. I am a giant extinguishing a bulb. WHITE HOUSE Maybe I should have waited, given my body more time let the pearling of that new Moon really settle in, burrow in its call to me, but I had shit to do and me to do and I forget the gall of the political how it begs against the centering of self, begs you to meet your wrangled drama at the door. I will always have the trouble of my need to do what Im told and my need to do what Im led to. I didnt worry that it was too late, I didnt worry about him at allmy body a salt capsule to drown, little concern for my pilot. All I can do now is swim good good love, take note of the golds that work me down, the shifts that calm my cool.