There is No Word for The Fear of White Women

And sure, a bird can be freedom or the converse. A wing’s implication is that flight is a methodical form of absence. But I’m saying more than that three stains became birds splayed against her shoulder blade, migrating nowhere. Or that I touched her back never suspecting wings even where the architecture implied it. This may not even be about fear, though it was abundant in the throbbing dark of her room. I might be the bird drifting somewhere out of habit and scarcity. I’m saying that I hated her almost as much as I hated what I would give to not be lonely. I hated her liquored breath, how she talked to me, the teeth of a hammer pleading a nail loose, the way she was the best I could do.

Ode to Being Called Mulignon at a Frat   Party & The Silence That Followed

Colloquially       it means Nigger
functionally       eggplant
my skin takes root     as his tongue
lolls wheat swollen in the swamp
of bodies dressed like a lynch mob
the theme of the party is hootenanny
the theme of the party is progress
the theme of the party is 2012
and everything is swaying
from the bass’ throbbing kiss

And still I know now the agony of silence

As my ex-roommate freestyles
and I know that nobody has heard him
Mulignon
               malignant
                                I am spreading?
No I root      I know       how this looks
if I go back to impulse     to throttle
to choke out     to pop off

I am the only evidence I have

And that is never enough
Praise now     the fallow knuckle
    the wilting of fists     the early winter     
how good I am at telling no one

How I had so much to lose
        beyond my skin
like his skin       ideal canvas for bruises
    to mark my turf      with peninsulas of loose blood
but still I own nothing
                                            but regret
   I pop my bones to the cadence of his voice
and wish the shifting of cartilage    could have been a song
I mean I did not flinch         I mean I did not lose my financial aid
that year           I mean if they gonna kick you out anyway
might as well break something
                                                      on the way out

Aubade With Panic Attack
After Ocean Vuong

Soft light
                      closed throat
I am        an aperture
   I flicker          in the yolk
of the light
                       fingers fail
to grasp at anything
        I pry open my own jaw
fumble for my phone
    between the yawning of graves panic attacks
play Alright
      a song always precedes the war

Alls my life I has to
                                       lie about where I am

                                    morning interrogation
                                    I audit my limbs
                                    for what I can still call mine

                                 by this point     I know I will pass out

                                I say often that I vomited
                                because a surplus of bile
                                is a better sin than a boy
                                with no lungs


                                       I close my eyes and see only blood
                                       there is enough crimson
                                       to name             a nothing

                                              my jaw is brimming with steam
                                                   I gasp       until the boy in my mouth
                                            comes loose    

                                                        a new boy dies each night
                                                  his name settles in my gums
                                            and blooms by dawn

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. A Pushcart Prize nominee he has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Julian is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review’s Lineage of Mirrors and a poetry editor for Freezeray Magazine. He is also a cofounder of the Afrolatinx poetry collective Piel Cafe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Nepantla, Rattle Poets Respond, Ninth Letter, Vinyl, Puerto del Sol and African Voices among others. He is a candidate for his MFA in Poetry at Ole Miss.