2 poems
a black renter wills a failing battle with debt
(with Fred Moten & R.A. Judy & our mutual air)
it is not property :: black hesitance
or sociological insinuation
it is not real estate
what fails us { what failure in us }
{ a broke black } { a bank broke }
a broken { black note }
it is not debt
a black renter
liquidates :: it is an upstream
cavalcade or prolonged death
{ after we were dead }
{ we assemble as air }
or smoke
renew { our mutual }
refusal
as we will it :: it is the textures
the textiles { a design }
or semiosis —
i have no way of knowing for all the years i live as carbon emission
{ i am what they refer to as socially dead } { alive and not }
outside time i can make things appear as they are not
i can make it seem i am a euphemism for anything
for seventy or seven hundred years i am nowhere
i appear to move around the world as any human might
alone
as now
i am never anywhere other than where my mental apparatus carries me
often it is shade
i am never really anywhere other than where you imagine me
alone
as now i wish i could stop relying so much on narration
i am inside the body of a human who adores me
beside a body as illumined as any desert dream alive in multiple dimensions
as ennui drags in we the day
it is morning the sense inside our body tells we
and for a moment we are alive
the time it takes to get out the bed walk the length of one room to another
feel the interdimensional sentience
fail inside this ongoing experiment of being among the living
of having lived of continuing to live
for nothing other than black or liquid carbon { or smoke }
fahima ife teaches black studies, intimacies, poetics, aesthetics, and surrealisms in the Department of English at Louisiana State University. They are the author of maroon choreography (Duke University Press, 2021), and other experimental creative works that appear or will appear in Air/Light Magazine, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Poetry Project, and other places. They are from California and now live in New Orleans.