self portrait with black box and open architecture
- self portrait with black box and open architecture
[T]he names by which I am called in the public place render an example of signifying property plus. In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.
—Hortense J. Spillers
Somewhere a door falls from its hingesAnd another refuses to lock.A lid flutters then noiselessly snaps shut. [End Page 106]
I awaken into memory chased with whiskey and wineWhere my intimate sleeps unarmed, impervious to pain,Their skull tattooed with an intricate grid, studdedWith jewel-lit ring-shank nails, their belly inflamedWith rot, spoiled air, and cut grassFrom the patterned hills they roam. They hauntWith a muffled drum. Flesh and drunken bloodAct in concert, deliberate and heavy if not certain,Hands vague and coarse to batter or caress, the fingersLeaking. [End Page 107]
Feeling devolves to appetite. Its brass current as certainAs a train’s bladed wheels and amputations are precise.To have a mouth, a gut, to have skin, to want.My body will not be denied to make space for another.It is social and just and self-possessed. Its inattentionsSelective.
Somewhere a fist. Androgyne child scratching at sleep.Teeth as long as a man’s palm, and porous. [End Page 108]
I find myself meandering, wearing the frayed liningOf another’s coat hidden beneath my undergarments.My desire, a note tied to a rock and thrown against fearLike fear hardens against feeling, a boarded windowBarring a summer storm. [End Page 109]
I dream my jaw is missing and in its place a boltOf red cloth weighted to the loom, silk skeinsand trembling tucked deep into my pocketsas I dive into clear water.
There is always a sea.Alongside the road, surrounding the field,Behind the shuttered houses, enfolding a strange city.And before the city and under and within itThe bodies of a girl and boy repeat themselves, enrapt.Held in the moment before drowning they floatIn the sea, suspended between depressions in the water,Arched into form. [End Page 110]
Debt is a closed system and I am the airInside the box. Warmer and wetter than I expect. [End Page 111]
Editor of Obsidian, poet/performance artist Duriel E. Harris is the author of Drag, Amnesiac and Speleology (poetry video). Nominated for the Pushcart Prize recent writing appears in Fifth Wednesday and Kweli as well as BAX, The Force of What’s Possible and The & Now Awards 3. Harris’s current projects include Thingification—a one-woman show. Note on the poem: Ideally printed on the six faces of a cube. I think the title and epigraph would, in that case, appear separately.
