Decrescendo, and: Levitation
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DECRESCENDO
Or, Transubstantiation.Or, How I became a word: atavism, fetishism, lack.Write the body as absence of body as excess of body prelude to the historical ruderal matter awaiting form and purpose.Classify.Trace the difference, index the stained reticula the savage tongue the blackened sex. Make of my pubis the plane of immanence.The difference is fixed. [End Page 105]
LEVITATION
in which the marginalis centeredhoisted, upwardby the straptethered to a branch.
huddled, the masscongeals—a buck-toothedgrin; a devouring gaze; losingtheir bodies, to become a body,ravenous.
above the disembodied,dismemberment.hovering, piecemealneck snapped skyward,what might have once been calleda face, opened.
in the open,a question: what makes possible becoming? [End Page 106]
TYRONE S. PALMER is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Lecturer in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. His work has appeared in Qui Parle, Critical Ethnic Studies, Vinyl Poetry, The Offing, and The New Inquiry.
