*
listen
mine is a body that starts as a sliver of rain
the field repeats—
now that i’m gone
now that i’m a procession of plump
mud-babies just in
from the hyper-strife—
we point our stubby fingers in
our beaks saying aaaak! aaaak!
& of course i oblige
when i am the blue-faced rooster whose
scales are whitestwhite
i like to crawl into the chest of the decomposing
& wear us
loose like an illness-i-don’t-know-what
i lie awake
for hours this way
with a loneliness like a moist-invisible—
we two black lambs mewling in
a subway-tunnel-to-no-one
our microscopic faces
calling out at dusk
from the kiwano patch—
a little blankblank in every
kernel
floating in the floodwater
*
scientists report
a massive shape-sound
off the coast
do you read me?
i mean
is there
an instrument
that can read
this body
that gas station
on fire
this region of
permissible
silence
*
when i am the void
in your mother
you do not tread me
i tread you
tucking you in
raising you up
from the dirt
*
bury these hands
in your wounds
see? we’ve never been
so close
inuksuk
it’s true
i haven’t laughed an inch
since i was a black weevil in
the primordial ooze
if you’re hungry
for the end then
HELLO
i am a loyal little shrew
in your throat
calling the deceased name thusly
it’s so cramped
between this
black sheet with
bullet holes &
white sheet
with bullet holes
when the vultures come to feed
duh inuksuk
i become
the vultures feeding calling
the deceased name thusly
*
in the strife-brane
that plush-
polyp quaking in the corner
you can call him rabbit-rabbit
& this dog-body
lays a gimp-
leg against our monitor to rest which
tickles like a rumor
the white-latex-
sky sucks up
my ghost
folding-shut behind me
i know better
but my coding says
i’m attracted to the blacklight like you
when i hear the voices
scratched-out of a village-
twerp
but continue to chew the wheat-cake-of-empire
i hang my
snout
low with the look of a dry-wood-
spigot
in the hyper-strife
this humble
roach
likes to scree in its concave
grove
where my forest-
cock raises its mossy
neck its cleft-
chin
suddenly so concerned about the world!
already searching
splat-splat
in the satellite-
dust instead of here
& here in the ream-
ecology where we hurt the most
the rack-master soaks
his feet in our vinepaste
& our sprouts huddle under
his translucent-
spit-dangle
by spookfall
it’s a fern-dangle
our tartaric-
beaks
wailing in the finch-
weed
Madison McCartha reading this excerpt from FREAKOPHONE WORLD
Madison McCartha is a black poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in DREGINALD, Full-Stop, The Journal, jubilat, Yalobusha Review, The Pinch and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and will be a 2018 Artist-in-Residence at The Millay Colony for the Arts.