— XENOLALIA, OR TALKING WHITE: THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE AND DESCRIPTION OF THE LAWS? by Makshya Tolbert


Everywhere, god
in parcels

the land
outstretched

on which he has cast
his eyes—

speculating a love
of forsythia

once
accumulated:

sanctuary
evidentiary

heaven a
prayer cast

for property

juridical self
possession
a pilgrimage

perpetual

directionality
disturbed &

wild nightshade
hinged

at the neck
                    in wait //

For if a slave
can have a country
in this world

it is through petitions

one perpetual exercise
from cradle
to grave

in objects:
worship

exploration:
by force

we commune
with god

pray the assembly
find the prayer
reasonable

tease ritual
out of record

catch
the lineaments
of wrath

like imitative animals

we keep god
where
we can see him

we extirpate the black
birds—as if to say

stay, try and stay //

Here lies the prayer
of twelve honest
men

crisis of
               accumulation
               forgetting

prayers
that never
register

the failure
that we stay
some other
public

but our debts
stay bad

we keep buying
another song

instruments
not of speculation
but of spirit

pastored
in wild green

born in
the charismata
of spirit &
air           that aria

god         not in parcels
but in porous
sky //

 

Makshya Tolbert (she & they) is a poet living in the spaces between blk memory and ecological possibility. She has recently published poetry in Narrative Magazine, Ran Off With The Star Bassoon, Alluvia Magazine, and The Night Heron Barks. She has poetry and essays forthcoming in Emergence Magazine and Art Papers. Makshya is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at the University of Virginia’s Creative Writing Program. In her free time, she is elsewhere—where Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls ‘that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.’