“In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present”

and uses migrant hair to bait its hooks

while Europeans burn history from their books.

Unbalancing the boat for a closer look,

the Mediterranean glances at itself in migrants’ eyes

as their dinghies lose their utterances in the sea

of Nigerians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Sudanese

darkening with hunger. Sailors taking pictures

like a squall gasps and freezes at the vista.

In the Mediterranean over which a French warship,

Angola, Thomas Hunter, Nightingale, the HMS Black Joke,

Queen Anne’s Revenge, Robert, Hope,

Othello (1781), Othello (1786), Antelope,

Enterprise, Alexander, Sugar Cane, Henrietta Marie,

Britannia (1788), Wanderer, HMS Monkey,

Trouvadore, Emanuela, Britannia (1783),

La Amistad, Aurore, Duc du Maine.

What is in the shipping news? The Marine

List as endless transposition. What is the within?

Mimetic self-mastry paints a scene:

the waves repeat their inexact canon,

an annotation, sharp asterisk, perpetual annexation

up in the ship’s wake, a recapturing, a chronic disease

of ghosts, an eroded investment, cargo seized

ephemera-over-ephemera. Legalese

cloud shadow in the water. Blackened dinghy,

revision, meaning’s umbilicus severed. Dull pageantry

with freedom’s language. The necessary

could be given like a disease. Freedom bored

into the jumped-into-freedom before the Lord,

with the sweat of the thrown-overboard,

prepared to disclose their semblances within me, bountiful.

Many likenesses I have imbibed. What shrouds,

dear Wake, if my body is 70 percent water. How

will I give AIDS to the sharks? Speak, failed civilization.

Sculpt indifference, fluent disdain. Sunken Africans

the Wake blamed for the neglect-fed nations.

The Wake spits up familiars, flesh and splinter alloy.

The Wake unseals epitaphs from throats thought fallow.

Of a sea being entered and what entered ever-swallowed—

in the wake of the taken-in, of ruptures in the track;

in the wake of Atlantic afflictions, of this liminal black;

in the wake of departure and salt spray—who looks back?

Herald

HERALD

His back arched as though through his heart

his shoulder blades would push into the air

their ante-wing. I have seen such doves go

into what seemed like light but was another

cave. What feathers weight a cage over my heart?

But, Cassandra, no one asked you. The goring that

sudden entry into any sanctuary could become

was not me alighting. “What love?” was

the question from the mouth his back and the bed made.

The Field