Cyree Jarelle Johnson

Excerpts from TRIUMPHS
Cyree Jarelle Johnson

In response to Brandon Drew Holmes’ I am what I am, And what I am is (2017), and Tiana. (2017)

Dear felt bolt delighted by the toucher’s petting:

In an apparition where I call out for a God__Androgyne. He appears, beardless.
            I can see your outline in the half-dark of the theater.           Your head was tipped back for the carton.
                       You, as a civilization of bees who confront me as I endeavor through the woods.
                                    I am too accustomed to a particular shade of vice              a frigid instability
                                    a joke told with rough elbows            a brother who came back small from the wars.

Dear felt bolt delighted by the toucher’s petting:

I observe my fluid necklace & I stroke my rot tooth while he hunts
with the dagger he retained in his gullet for dangerous opportunities.              He says he can’t let it go.
He isn’t lying. The skin of his left hand grafts the hilt.

There’s a bright spot in all this                     now he’s ambidextrous.
His left hand is dominant and still completely empty.      
                                                     I wonder if I’m the malinfluence.

Look how the blood and bile pools in the bowl of tree roots just beyond the sidewalk
look. How his intentions nuzzle static from my pockets                  weighted forever with silk violets.
I’d ask him why he did it, but he’ll never answer                             and, worse, he doesn’t know.

So I tell him: it’s that thing. The bony thing that rides you.        The skin carved wheel
The robe not fitted for you and sliding uncontrollably               That’s the why? in your matter’s stomach.

Dear felt bolt delighted by the toucher’s petting:

Two cities and four blocks from where I write this letter                         there is a black-owned dry cleaners.
In the lobby, lavender gumballs are a quarter

I tell the man I found                 to give me his three lonely fractions
I beg additional fractions.                             I pluck a dime and two nickels from our change tree.

The tarp lips of the tent flap when wind-possessed and speak through the whip of the body.
Today, the tent hissed you must walk through two cities, and the four additional blocks.

 When you reach the black-owned dry cleaners, evade or engage the double-dutch assassins.
Be confronted by the unfact of your once girlhood:               its ball-balls,

 it’s plastic poodle barrettes and the ones that look like bows, its excruciating white tights
its white patent leather shoes and undeniable danger—

 —I mean, well, anyways fill your apron with lavender gumballs                   and bring them back home.

 O dear felt bolt:

Damn the unremarkable tarp tent who generated my errand                      but the black-owned dry cleaners
inflates in my vision now: the owner’s face zig-zagged with wrinkles          her husband’s Violet chewing gum.

I engaged the double-dutch assassins           on nostalgic feet
I lost only one barrette, plastic seafoam.                            (Even so, I will be punished

such is the culture.) The ends of my twists now loose                     I swing wide the portal to the shop
                                 The owner was playing “Rockin’ Chair”         I was scandalized. It was yet noon.

Her husband pushed your body through his pin machine            The owner peeped over oval spectacles
                                 she giggled with her hand upon her mouth.            I just came for an apron of gumballs

 I told them                 they didn’t hear me. They would not have cared.

O dear felt bolt:

You must have noticed the man I found doesn’t speak.                         I’ll have you know I numbed his tongue
with my pincers.            We are happier this way.                          A silent man is useful.

If I am honest I am afraid of everyone.                             If you can no longer be beautiful, be vain.
Look at how my face goes crooked in the mirror.            Look at how my body hulks.

The man I found is sweeter than I imagined                    my feet criss-cross behind his neck
or between his lips like unpopped slugs                     
or on a packed dirt floor as I dance                                 Three Sea Captains set or Juba. I can never decide.                   

We will wear the skin of the men who rub their weapons. We frolic in our yard.
I pour the lavender gumballs in the hollow in the skull he shaved.

He is a good man.
We chew our gumballs one by one by one.                          We gnaw back the apocalypse.

O dear felt bolt, fringed & hanging as a flag at the back of the church:

I love the man like white poets love flowers.                  I tell the man I love him and I do love him.
I love the man like light-bright poets love blackness like a mirror to their absence
but I love you with the burden.

So deep is my love to him it is a black mirror, is rudeness and flicker.
Even a dire body has its beauty. I watch the Miyazaki movie. I squint and I can’t see it.

Across the street from our tent lives a church.                                  The church is loud Sunday and Wednesday.
         The Black Jesus in the stained glass has a Jheri Curl.           The Black Jesus on the wall looks like Tupac.

O dear felt, bold with seagulls and open legs:

The trumpet for the love work inherent in rolling a blunt.                                      An age of praise songs
to a tight blunt             the attentive tongue, damp and flicking as though searching
for pleasure. as painful as it’s coy.             Owner of any necessary spin
your coney island sugar string of pure pink wind.                                 It’s perplexing but I think I want to say
the simple thing.                 Rings carved into shrimp shells and pebbles                 with calloused toes                 
or limb bandaged to the elbow.                         When I gurgled my terror
geiser                                              ejaculate & ambergris smeared the project of love.                 
When you sneeze
tart between our popular elevators                                   I feel my newly buoyant chest.

dear beloved as a swarm of bees in the rotten cow’s hide:

What do they call it when so many bad things happen         and you feel
nothing? Who is the they       I am asking                                    will we ever have a portrait
drawn together like our legs dangling over the scabbed lips of a lake
praying to spell my open sores V-E-C-T-O-R.                       The joy I feel is from finally getting
what was coming to me                         another awful deal.

I’m writing this because if I write this and write this you aren’t gone and I’m not here
it’s so embarrassing that you’ve been the fat part of my weeks     been the good news
         been, sometimes, the only hug            the only one proud of me.

The I left is not an I and it is eyeless.                   The universe sighs with stank breath.
The boys from my phone are sour.         I am sour with grief. I refuse to transcend.

dear beloved as a swarm of bees in the rotten cow’s hide:

Let’s play test the train at Beacon
O how it zooms swift enough to blink away                    a life etched in vapor.

I am not a white poet                the birds on the street are anonymous   I do not name the people
on the street.                I do not passion the birds.         I know the names for flowers, but don’t say.

At night, the we’re-wolf of what are we foams               around the tent
I wonder where to find him                  (but what are we)

here on the better side of terror                        passing flesh and fluid between our lips
barely out of the marsh where fear’s cadaver hands pierce         digits rigid as a hollowed out horn.