& the augurs among us direct our gaze to the sky all alluvial
breaking through, breaking blue & we open our mouths to
catch the cerulean, catch the rugged blues again on our tongue, blurred & bruised
decadent deluge of dirge drenching skin, dandelions, & dirt. diviners say we dancing dizzy to the
ends of the world, dancing at the end of the world. to elsewhere. edging to
flight. let there be flight. & there flight be. we be a many-forked-tongue folk,
glossolalia-gurgling, crossing-&-translating-other-realms folk. apocalyptic glitch, we put our
hands on our hips, then put our hands in the air, hold our hands to the haints & catch their
iridescent feathers. oh haints, come true to us, come blue to us, come through to this
juke joint we call earth, this jagged jollification. we won’t jilt you. no, we
keep our dead kin with us as the dead kin have kept us the living.
listen, they can’t catch us, but they can catch these hands, these
moonfire spells to undo & redo, this fractalwinged explosion of this world, this
newness, this emergence—that isn’t actually that new at all. if we telling the truth about our
origins, this is quite old. blues old, which is bones old, which is dirt old. oh, yes we’ve got our
poems, parables, psalms, & our own palms as record that we’ve refashioned ourselves before, we’ve
questioned ourselves before. quivered with loss before. made portal of crisis & quantum-leap
rebirthed. bled & tended flesh wounds with rest & stinging medicine before because the material
without the spiritual & psychic does not a dialectic make. let’s get the rhythm of our feet, let’s get
the rhythm of our throats, holding a cosmic alchemy of tragedy & celebration that can turn this
thing upside down so that the sky becomes soil & soil becomes sky & dirt is what we seek for
salvation. verily, verily, when you get this rhythm, meet us at the crossroads. you’ll know because
you’ll hear whistling from the mulberry trees. you’ll smell them, too. & we’ll be there, perched.
looking real xenial & otherworldly. we’ll be humming with the haints, conspiring about
going up yonder. going up yonder to be with our motherworld.
zoom zoom. we’d like to fly away. fly away to right here.

poetry-magazinehow we got our blues-tongue

how we got our blues-tongue