Bound

“I’m afraid of nothing so much as myself,” says the speaker in “The Mansplaining,” from Jubi Arriola-Headley’s second poetry collection, Bound. The poem explores how the speaker’s rage is informed by their relationship to gender, sexuality, and race:

My first time. I cannot remember that
my cock was hard but it was. I don’t know what I wanted. I know
what I wanted. I should have understood that rage would have color, and

that color would be white.

In its closing line, the poem nods to the collection’s title, while also acknowledging the effects of rage on those we love most: “I want so much to be bound. Save me. Save yourself.”

Throughout, Arriola-Headley grapples with Blackness, queerness, the legacy of violence in US history, and the role of poetry in enacting meaningful change: “Y’all act like poetry can fix the world? / Show. Me. When.” And elsewhere: “a poem a day is the only prescription i can afford to fill.”

But it is poetry that allows the speaker to turn rage into something joyful and liberatory. The poem “Machete” opens: “Listen, my loves: the path toward Liberation is thick / with bramble.” Later, in the same poem:

                You’ll need a torch, too, to burn away
the underbrush, and thus matches, and next an accelerant.
Your rage will do just fine.

There is dark humor here, and Arriola-Headley is clearly in conversation with other poets—some of the poems in this book address questions posed in Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, while “Requiem: after Victoria Chang” takes the form of the obituary poems in Chang’s book, Obit.

Even as they wrestle with complex socio-historic narratives and intersectional identities, these poems allow for

        the exercise of pleasure as
revolution. The incantatory vapors it
raises, they steady us. We breathe, deep,
for all those what couldn’t.