I touch each ship and hear their sons scream back, “Big Spring! Canaan! Florence! Hazelton! Marianna! Terre Haute!” Angola both prison and not yet, both slave ship and not yet mahogany mutilated into floatviolence. Both nation and vulgar coloniality. Present-past self and past-present self detect a mighty calculus in Grandma’s quilt. Map to the Door of Heretofore. Quilombos unhide from dark lines of melanated nail beds and grown pikes that sprout buckra heads in toto. Tongues out. Ass out and weary, I practiced marronage and ended up at Church’s. Tongue out weather-vaning grease stench toward other futures. The weather in the flowering mountains shakes like the birth of a new nachon. Ol’ dude watching the gate the clouds make at the peak ain’t Elegba though he sho smell like funeral flowers, a wild aunt’s locked cupboard rum-wasted and doused with pennies. The likka burn like row houses on Osage, like Black Wall Street scorching wings to the backs of children, like Springfield, Illinois, charred to the fossil. O nostalgia, clamordumb muse, known silhouettes darken the water overhead. I look where one should not look in the heat of a threat. Moan-summoned, I look up.

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