Switch/Gate

Transistors live in barns amid exquisite patina.

Barns are secure for transitioning from here to

Xanadu. I transistor my little heart out.

             I shout out: This one’s for June! Lucille! Toni! Ai! Gwendolyn!

             Margaret! Carolyn! Phillis! This one’s for Amiri! Langston!

             Etheridge! Gil! Lorenzo! My long-winded emcee life.

Tchht. Suck my teeth

because nothing but echo (echo) for forty-six days.

(Tchht.)

The dead air

sounds like myself deflected by

the Yonder

             Renaissance, Black Art Milieu. So. I imagine

             where I cannot be: every floor of the actual/

             theoretical space has timeline technology. Phono-

graph, vinyl, 8-track, cassette, compact disc, mp3, analog

and digital players, fucking victrola. Black folk who can

and cannot dance, whatever that means, dancing.

 

II.

 

When Michael Harper’s voice through haze calls Why you

so Black I know I’ve sent my voice [from my desk to

 

the sure

Great Beyond, Unknown Wherefore, Afterlife Metropolis].

 

Every blue moon, the switch/gate lets an ancestor through.

Say I?

 

Yo mama so Black every time she gets out the car

the check oil light comes on. Yo mama so Black her

 

blood type is burnt. Yo mama so Black she went

to night school and got marked absent.

 

Gathered in grade school recess. My generation’s

contribution to the dozens.

 

Static increases when he laughs.

Say I?

 

Who else there?

But he drinks alone his own humming.

 

Gets flirty.

Why you all over there? Points his chin at me through the fuzz.

 

Because I am.

 

I’ve never known how to tell a man to back up and quit that shit

without writing it down.

 

The radio was my idea—thinking I could get overwhere.

His idea, too, turning a ridged dial hoping to project.

 

This is how I begin: calling, reaching out my longest arm with

want to connect.