FINAL POEM FOR AMIRI BARAKA

Crow Jane died on Baraka’s watch

Must be a necromancer among us

throwing her corpseheart into a flush

of copse Autumn-bloodied nobodies

no-bodying in trellised gusts

their small dusks be-holing the view

A gestalt of crow feathers is erasure

wherever bird lands births unbirths

a leaving that is unleaving

or prison poised above the languid stupor

of bloodlake of concrete of an outline a lesson

in banality a shamemask an umbral expulsion

in catalpa drawing your daddy face

on the phone lines decomposing

a better song beneath the song

beneath the limp symbol of a blackbird’s glint

hainting down the juju cauldron ripe with nails

moseying up the parted fields like Moses

in my niece’s cornrows infected with caws

Crow Jane’s black got a white mind that bird

never did nothing but love us like a canon

a false Nibbana blown-out Paradise Aleph in second

place lice copulate on the occipital’s river imagine that

a snake stiff in a crow’s beak catalectic a pendant

a luckless banner Noah’s dove in reverse no never

Three-toed frog and snake fly before do the crow

Crow Jane died so Damballah could take hold

The Flying African

THE FLYING AFRICAN

“Kum . . . yali, kum buba tambe.”

—Virginia Hamilton

The bird minstrels shrill vulgar

mimetics of my folklore’s song.

In whispered incantations, wings scar

clean from my back, shake shadows

like pools of night over slave quarters

mangled with cotton. Belief in me

makes me a belonging, curves me

scintillant into half-moon like a scythe

cradling the sun. Anansi could never.

In Georgia, I heel-spun once

and took off toward Igboland, Atlantic

water foaming, a hellhound’s maw

beneath me. Carolinian mansions undressed

to ruin as my black feathers curtained

Doric columns and draped over Ole Missus

a death veil. I wedded Cuba

and departed in a hurricane’s revolving hunger,

Amadioha snatching palm leaves

from my swamp-whelmed hair. Unbreakable

tale: I shape-shift, my body many-birded, as a serpent

winds my throat, reminder of the soil that waits

against the wake of a hundred undead ships

carrying me to a living crisis. Need

by need it mattered who needed me: the enslaved

unbound by their making me. I contort

beck and call to resurrect the drowned bloating

in the dark cell of a dream. If the truth is that

the captured chose the ocean over chains,

then I am hope’s raw epistle love-lettering alibis

against the grave. I carry the stolen many in my mouth,

readying for rebellion. Each captured day

I arrive with a new face carved for retribution,

my grin an orphanage of blades.

Mushmouf’s Maybe-Crown