Armory Notes, an excerpt

TIMBER 2014

Khadijah Queen

Khadijah Queen, PhD, is the author of five books, most recently I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books 2017). Earlier poetry collections include Conduit (Akashic / Black Goat 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press 2011) and Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015). Her verse play Non-Sequitur (Litmus Press 2015) won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women's Performance Writing. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at University of Colorado, Boulder, and serves as core faculty for the Mile-High MFA in creative writing at Regis University.

Armory Notes, an excerpt

Originally written alongside Ann Hamilton’s installation Event of a Thread

A sound made by a living animal is a voice. We begin

by stating the obvious. Sometimes pursuit is
an animal. A swing toward the essential
scream. A scream also is fire.
An unpleasant consumption. We identify
the scintillate avoidance of the soul which must answer,
wavering. The hordes clamor at the entrance. It’s up to place
and forms, early admittance. Half of my people are gone
because of you. I recognize
what everyone knows and everyone knows you.
If only the smiling faces could swing you out. If only it could
turn out better than estimated. I worry
about my posture. I swing from small
worry to large, the lead a chain I write with.
I write across the white.

~

I am not afraid of being seen. I prepare myself
to not be. I don’t fear being ignored; a comforting
fact. A tempered knowledge. We have
always been intimate, dear fear. Today and tomorrow
are not the end. The past isn’t dead, Faulkner said; it’s not even past.
True or false, you crawl into the moments
like dust. You are made up of skin. Your priority
is sometimes potential. Actuality as potentate. You are carbon.
You are irascible. You are forgotten, like traffic
we choose when you are an annoyance
and when to fall in step with you, when to have somewhere
to go. On a slant, you stand still and point
with hard white fingers. The mirror swings. I leave fingerprints
reflected in the glass. Desperate
to hold down what I want to express. Soon I will need to sharpen.
The vices become ghostly,
surrounding. The bodies encroach

~

Dear fear, I have sharpened the leadened blade of my voice. Coupled men pause. Guards keep watch over small children.

~

Someone delivering sound takes it away.
I know it may have something to do with you.
A fan of entropy and encroachment.

~

Sometimes stillness is a mask; to mask how much of you has taken over
a body. Sometimes it’s void. Passersby moving through with you,
throwing off sparks of your impossible eternities. I have to stop
thinking of them that way, but it’s hard to not witness. I have witnessed my whole life.
Fear, I have to become who I am without you.

~

I think I’ve discovered your secret and a secret weapon against you, which isn’t a secret if you listen. Not you, fear, but us, as you, deciding how to exist.