… a human body would not make it
to the seafloor intact
*
NO LOITERING
IN THE WATER
They whisper like fish. The police
in schools like fish
… the atoms of the people who were thrown overboard—
*
Sometimes my lungs feel like stones
in the hypnagogic hour—that watery room
between wakefulness & sleep
*
The faint formation of land in the distance—
that’s when horror struck
in the mind of the African
*
abovedeck—the moment just before
our African became -American
*
… out there in the ocean even today.
Hidden in the language
in the pelagic tunnels. Narrow corridor
of attention. Fish whisper
*
They avoid our shadows
like fish. Ghosts in schools
like fish. Police in schools—
NO LOITERING
IN OUR HISTORY
“. . . we talk like fossils
in this country . . .”
*
The amount of time it takes
for a substance to enter
the ocean and then leave
the ocean is called residence
time
*
those who took the ocean
as their home, murmurous
as my footsteps
*
Standing midnight at the Atlantic harbor
I hear the fishermen
yelling to one another out on the water
where they’ve just noticed the sea beginning to part
a corridor of murdered Africans million-ghost-marching
to Wall Street
*
We were always white folks’ white whale.
Ain’t that some shit?
Next: Read Anna Deavere Smith on being one of the first Black students at a small women’s college.