#deardrake

[deardrakelovediane]

Dear Drake #87

Drake,

my great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grand awesome awe-full mother was busy fixing people plates in front of the flames humming and keeping the beat when Boukman started singing those incantations don’t tell me this is not a time for revolution look at the hour we find ourselves in look at the time we could do this right now i could take your darkness i could break it in half i could get on my knees and hold the strength of you in my two small hands swallow the white white white nut of your dark all of it every last drop and it wouldn’t poison me one lick it would fall through the gap that used to lie between my front teeth and though i closed it i hid it i was telling the truth when i said i came from the abyss it left a mark in my mouth twice it left marks all over my bones i’m dangerous i could swallow you whole i could eat your hole i could be chewing on you holding your body in my left cheek while i mumble prayers for your soul what i can’t hear you i’d sing good God i’d wash you down with lemonade squeezed out of limes it’s a miracle i’d put you to sleep with sweet sweet salty sticky never bitter poems i’d put on plays that would never ever leave you i’m full of bad blood i’m full of rich blood my sister is anemic four years after her i got a bunch of veins full of blood when i was ten my father’s sister took me to get my blood tested and the results confirmed i didn’t have the sickness i could’ve told her i healed myself by being born when i first started bleeding i didn’t tell anyone not even my mom not even my mother in prayers before i went to sleep not even my sister not even my cousin i still sleep next to i started to become a woman in secret i started to become a woman on my own with no applause no teddy bear no mug with the word congratulations printed on it everyone found out after the fact i said oh yeah i’m becoming a lady i guess i’m one of you now i was already one of you i already started forgiving i already started making sacrifices and compromising and having mercy and being silent i got big i got mad i started having pity i hated it i hated you i hated that thing inside you that reverse halo all around you i wanted to kill it so you could love me every single time it was never the worst idea i’ve ever had i have lots of dreams some during the day some at night some while you’re sitting across from me my imagination is so big it eclipses us both it surrounds us all that’s the only kind of dark i like that and the black of my hair the black of my elbows of my knees of all my crooks my corners the black of every one of the birthmarks all over my body don’t steal them they’re mine let’s play a game where you count them and i let you know if you’ve successfully recognized me reckon with me in this next year i’m going to be all clarity for the rest of time i’m going to be real clear when i talk to you when i get to work while i’m doing my work while i feed you bread and wine and water eat it drink it i’ll give you a place to rest close your eyes open your body give praise my body is a church you can’t trample me have mercy i’m hot fire you can’t burn me down i’m at my coolest when Brooklyn’s steaming in the middle of July don’t come sniffing around my church unless you’re trying to know the hymns by heart don’t come to my church unless you’re willing to learn the songs of my heart first the beat is different here we use our feet too here we stomp out the dark with our feet real light we dance all over the dark we trample it we strangle it with hands that have laid themselves on fallen bodies slap your death back at you it stinks don’t it i love the smell of saltwater i love the site of fresh waves i respect them i see them when they crash and remind me they’re also always full of a force that must be reckoned with a force that hits hard hard hard we’re kin however big your boat is won’t make us kinder me and the waves we’re not so easily impressed have mercy have a clue come back to me when you have some other idea i swear to every single God i will listen just have something for me have some respect for yourself have the time of your life get a life and tend to it all lives are like gardens it’s so crazy how some of them don’t even matter it’s so wild how some lives get snatched with such control get burned like the cane fields my great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grand mother worked before her master no rumor no joke told her to burn it all down in preparation for the next season’s growth we learned resurrection from the land from the earth from the sweet syrup of that cruel cane but that doesn’t mean we ever liked the taste of death we just know what it smells like it stinks we just know what it looks like it stinks have some sight fore from hind have a great big chunk of mercy have a recently burned field own up to a freshly burned field renewed just in time for the warmth of the same sun might as well if we’re all already on fire anyway

[deardrakelovediane]

Dear Drake #86

Dear Drake,

The last moments of this present revolution around the sun are so quiet, trying to find a pizza store to order a few pies from.

We’re all so hungry.

I can’t remember the start of this year, can’t remember how famished I was.

I think of a character from a story I wrote in May and how she was just walking around in quiet until the stomach of the person she was strolling side by side with growled so loud she could no longer pretend she didn’t hear it. She could no longer ignore her own hunger.

They were hungry for different things, hungry in different ways, but she was always thinking of something else to eat.

She was in it for the big feast.

I think of every woman I’ve ever written and she, every single one, has always been looking for something else, has always been about something else, has always been singing a different song, has always been doing another dance.

She’s always in another time, in another year.

We’re at the end of this one.

My dearest Drizzy, we’re at the end of this!

(But let’s face it, we’ve been beyond for a while now.)

This moved beyond you so long ago.

It went beyond me.

This got bigger than the both of us right after jump.

We’re so small.

Everything is bigger than us.

Our work is bigger than us. But we have to be able to hold it in our hands.

We have to be able to let it go. We have to be able to name it. We have to be able to not know exactly what it is. We have to do all of these things at the same time.

We have to make magic. We have to create marvels.

We can’t let anyone steal our magic. We can’t let them kill our marvels.

We have to hope.

We have to love.

We have to fight.

We can’t stop working.

We can’t ever be done yet.

No, no: I’m not done yet…

[deardrakelovediane]

Dear Drake #85

Dear Drake,

I’m so alarmed.

I’m laughing.

I know I’m a little strange in my family. Some would use different words. Some would call me a “moun blan” when I say repeat, “No, he definitely did it. All of it.” I can’t believe I have to say this out loud in my own home. I’m laughing. I can’t believe I am called a “person white” when I say repeat, “They are women,  not liars. People think they’re lying because they’re women.” That no one in this living room can see the tragicomedy of my having to declare such a statement given our own generational catastrophes with men is a hoot.

I’m in stiches when going to school makes me white, living in another state makes me white, making art makes me white, eating healthy makes me white, not coming to the defense of a black man/national treasure/sexual predator makes me white.

I’m laughing:

When have any of these he’s been out here checking for me? Oh. Right. Never. Last I recall, every last one of them is still black as hell.

Black as me.

Listen, Drizzy.

I will ride for you because we are brethren and both of our bodies are at stake, but if you are trying to break my body, too… well, you render my mission impossible.

Because I’ll be dead.

And no longer strange.

Nonexistent. Extinct. Extinguished.

Did you hear the one about how there are a couple of ways to self-immolate?

You could watch a fire burning down your neighborhood and call it a conspiracy.

You could refuse to yell fire in your own backyard because you’re thinking, “Well, there’s already an inferno in the tri-state area.”

That is a fire. And that is a fire.

They are both burning. I keep trying to live.

I’m strange.

[deardrakelovediane]

Dear Drake #84

Dear Drake,

When Krystal gives me life it feels like a thousand hands kneading, the nails of a thousand fingers digging, clawing into my skin.

When Krystal gives me life it feels like walking from one cosmos where there are machetes for grass to another where there are firing guns for grass. And the only difference is, the only difference is, between the two grasses, the only difference is that now I know how to fly.

When you die and immediately ascend, you don’t spend any time— not one day, not forty— swimming through the unimaginable dark of the sea. And that’s the part, that’s the part Rose could never know. She keeps dying and coming back, dying and coming back. She’s on day 39 of dying and coming back.

I’m tired, but not as exhausted as her.

I’ve just been born. I’m so young. I’m a baby.

The hardest, bravest, biggest thing I could do is cry “Who are you,” as I take steps in your direction. Who are you when I approach your body? Who are you in relation to my body? Who are you in this moment? Who are you in this world?

And what do you plan to do?

When— after your ascension— you are dragged back down to earth, you get to live again— more— and ask these kinds of questions. And! And. And you get to expect some answers.

All ears (and eyes and nose and hands and voice), LW

[deardrakelovediane]

Dear Drake #83

Dear Drake,

When I get home I hear (read over and over again) news that the officer who shot and killed Tamir Rice will not face any charges.

Of all the letters I’ve written to you, how many have been penned in moments desperate for justice, desperate for some kind of societal recognition?

I walked around the blocks today with a person who feels like home. We popped Snapples and served up our myths for lunch. When we parted in front of my building, after a hug I wished didn’t have to end our cloud swaddled afternoon, instead of lying back on my mother’s couch drunk with a belly full of laughter and mozzarella cheese, I sat huddled forward, my phone on my knees, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.  

Post, re-post, share eulogies and elegies and mourning songs written exactly a year ago for a twelve-year-old boy whose life was stolen and thrown away too soon. A year later it’s still too soon. A year later I’m closer to home. You start to think your body isn’t fit for this universe when what you’re doing and what the world is doing seem so at odds. You try to go home. The world, or the officers hired to protect and serve it, keep stopping you in your tracks.

With each and every bullet.

With each and every name.

Everything always collapses at the end of a year; so in certain ways, this moment, unfortunately, is not unlike others. But the fact that any and all small joys have to happen at the same time as constant and repeated failures and absences of justice makes me think that joy isn’t meant to be seen, at least not right now. Right now there is no site for joy. There is no site for peace. There is no site for love. Because there are no reflections of joy. No reflections of peace. No reflections of love.

They’ve all jumped away from us. They’ve leapt. They are traumatized.

At some point a body was shot and killed. Then another. And another. And another. Justice jumped out of the window, jumped out of these fallen bodies and the walking ones, too. So when we call on it, when we call on justice, something else keeps showing up in its place; and it’s wearing a really bad costume. Some of us are fine pretending that the impression is good enough. But those of us who are not, those of us who are not fine, those of us who are angry and agitated and grieving and confused and threatened, keep pointing and screaming:

“THAT IS NOT JUSTICE!”

No, no. That is not justice.

I know that is not justice because I’m looking across the table, greasy paper plates between us, thinking, “Well, that’s home. That’s love.”

And if that is home and that is love then whatever is happening in this country—as it happens over and over again, every couple of months, every year later—is surely not justice.

So what is one to do if this is where you end up after these continually forced vision tests?

Rip it off.

Rip off the costume wherever you see it.

Name that thing.

Name whatever that thing is that will surely kill us all.

Name that thing so we can cast it out.

Name that thing so we don’t have to keep calling the names of these boys and girls and women and men right after they’ve been shot down too soon.

(And while you’re at it, name your love. Name your joy. And name your peace. Pray. Pray that we might come to recognize justice in all of its glory one day, too. Soon.)

[deardrakelovediane]

Dear Drake #82

Dear Drake,

I was talking to the artist Walid Raad today—or he was talking to me and lots of other people—and he goes:

“A war can affect color, line, shape, and form.”

This was the most interesting thing he had said all day.

He told this story about a woman who was a painter and would use a particular shade until all of a sudden something happened—a trauma occurred, a war—and from that moment on she no longer painted using that shade. She went to a psychologist and the psychologist said she was fine. She went to an eye doctor and the eye doctor said she was fine. But it was so strange because her studio was filled with this shade and yet this shade could no longer make its way into her paintings.

The shade left. It jumped. It leaped. It wouldn’t come back, even though it appeared to be everywhere and in plain sight.

(I don’t think this ever actually happened, but it’s the truest thing I’ve ever heard.)

Drake, what happens when you have recovered from your trauma, but your things have not?

You did everything you were supposed to: grieved, reckoned, found some way to get over, committed to moving beyond. But the paint in your can, the ink in your pen, your clay, your words are still traumatized because they remained material.

We humans can time travel in ways objects can’t. But this artist was proposing that things still make their escape. A shade of red leaves the canvas and finds refuge in the letterhead of a cultural organization. Or a line leaves a print and hides in the budget of an upcoming exhibition.

Where do the things we make art with go when they decide to leave us?

I think of the love and trepidation I have for the play I’m currently working on. Like a moon playing in the clouds, it constantly reveals itself to me and then immediately disappears. Where oh where could it have leapt?

Drizzy, look a little closer for where your art might be hiding, where your colors, your lines, your shapes and forms might be playing hide and seek. And why. Why have they jumped away from you?

What traumas have you experienced that you think—and maybe even know—you’ve moved on from, but your materials have not?

How does this change your work?

[deardrakelovediane]

Dear Drake #81

Dear Drake,

I took a break from writing to cut my sister’s hair. I am always surprised at how fragile I feel her skin to be, always surprised by the force my own fingers hold. I wonder about the fragility of her skin: mushy        mushy        gush        gush. Cool, clammy, and soft the back of her neck is. I think of the back of my neck being warm, smooth, and taut.

[deardrakelovediane]

Dear Drake #80

Black as the sky that holds the year’s last full moon, Black as the dried mushrooms whose water you steep your rice in, Black as beans, it’s true: “The sudden joys that out of darkness start/As flames from ashes…” Read some Longfellow in silence and apart. And though he may not always be your steez, observe your holiest of holidays and your anniversaries of the heart, as secret and varied as they may be.