Talk

by Emily House

This is about race.

It’s about a white girl talking about race.

And I want to put that out there,

‘cause when I write,

it’s easy to for my body to erase race

with metaphors and easy listenin’ symbolism.

This is about talking about it.

So let’s be clear.

We do not arrive.

There is not some set demarcation point

a conductor’s coppertin voice dictating

that this is where the rails stop

and you begin.

No, friend, we are in a constant state of

getting there, of seeing the horizon

and stretching out our finger bones,

grasping, catching,

letting go.

We don’t capture the horizon,

can’t wrap it in our palms and

smell the distance suddenly present.

There is no point at which we will sit up

at the of the world’s sidewalks,

edge

share a twilight glance and say,

This is it.

And to wait for that moment…

well, it’s been done.

I have turned my ear bones inside out this year, listening.

My watch hands have grown feet and walked on without me

as I have waited

and waited

and waited

and waited

and waited

and waited.

Maybe the words would tiptoe through my drumming ears

around my jaw, and lead a surprise attack on my tongue.

maybe

if I gave it enough tiiiiiime

my mouth would start speaking in blossomed ideas.

It would lead my brain around the stiletto steel structures

whose stone seeds I have happily eaten,

and whose roots now strike through my white skin.

They

no, I

impale those beside me.

With time, I thought, if I just opened my blank pores

I could be Inundated

with an o c e a n i c understanding.

How to:

mime a conversation

script an observation

see my own miseducation

and know how to Call People Out.

Smell the heath of my own shit

as I brought it to the table.

Waiting, I sat SILENT

in the putrid tropics of my color

unconsciousness.

Silence

is place whites need to shake hands with

*oh, a little more.*

When we can finally swallow our jug band egos,

silence is where the work begins.

But when our wordlessness

grows pornographic shadows,

and we start to Instruct ourselves

to the heat of others

speaking the lines for us,

this voyeuristic violence quietly sighs,

masturbating.

so This is my beginning

again

traincar-coupled with more beginnings

more and more

again

again

And now i’m scratching WORDS

into my body’s steel beams,

conducting self-surgery and laying them in front of me

my own, stationless tracks.

these, though, these are newly etched

painful, illegible, splintered,

pale echoes of intent

insufficient poetic incomprehension.

But nonetheless

they are My words.

Nonetheless,

My horizon.