Abecedarian: On Purchasing and Receiving…

Ancestry laid upon a curse, a jinx

Blood, and another thing molten—reveries of my face, the façade behind my face

Called to account the countries, deviations of echolocations:

Dead—mine—dark-detained

Ever banked in an ethnographic afterlife.

Fell—deep sleep postponing my rewrite, rotate, mutate;

Genes to be circumnavigated by spit-polished explorers.

How is a child’s globe a work of colonial conditioning?

In this condition, the wet hex in miniature

Jumps from gene sequence to succession. Pattern recognition:

Kinship, failing upriver—descent—

Life map itself in vials sent via the real

Mail, archaic method homesick for the gold horses of its origins.

Never miscalculate genealogical disruption’s (in)ability;

Orphan your ancestors in the underworld; above—who tends graves,

Pours the prayer of soju when the dead need music. Shall this be our final

Quarry, silent as a doe and daughter,

Reading the light, sewing a shade; a haunting

Sold to a centrifuge, the sterile shine of its exposed aperture—now

Travel to Neanderthal Valley; witness the heavy-brow-boned branch fork and break. Our dead

Underestimate us, time machines drifting at the rate of future’s arrival,

Venn diagrams of past and speculation

Where will we repose. Collected. Finger- and jawbone; dusted dictionary

Xenomorph, alien self, foreign

You, incarnate in the disciplined nation of the contemporaneous, stranger

Zealous for the sweet peace of the unborn, as yet unburied.

Source: Poetry (April 2020)