Eyewitness

 

how much will it hurt

to pull my eyes out of their sockets?

 

i have grown tired of seeing

or is it that seeing isn’t as powerful as i make it?

 

see:      his body a mausoleum verdigris’d in dust & blood

see:      the hole in his back just left of his heart where a wing won’t grow now

see:      his fam, who only knows his nickname, heads bowed with grip-tight fist whispering a

prayer called disbelief

see:      his fam eyes quaking beneath their eyelids trying to detach & find orbit, be moons, for

other planets

 

see:      ———————————————————

 

see:      [                                                                                                                                       ]

 

we don’t know what to do with our eyes.

they dream & nightmare & glint back illusions

making us their hostages.

 

i know crying over anything makes it holy.

 

see:      his mother tears leaching with his blood building an amethyst cathedral to carry him home

 

even if we know what to do with our tears.

they still fall & crash & stain the ground

we should be worshipping.

 

each day we should be praising our bodies

for that it lives, for that it breathes, here—

for that we can only see an arm’s length of mercy.

 

i don’t want to let my tears go.

i want to keep them, them safe.

but how do i pull out my eyes?

what hymn, what instrument, what ritual do i use

to cut deep wells into this misery?

 

o, how they should be reservoirs,

twin lagoons, a holyficated paradise

above a mouth that often tries to speak

the dead language of falling teardrops.

 

see:      him floating in one of the lagoons with the others while angels barbeque & keep vigil

 

they say, depending on what emotion,

your tears crystalline in a distinct form.

mine know anger now, so the form must be

like sasuke uchiha’s amaterasu.

 

see:      my irises scintillate into burning chrysanthemums

 

see:      me, like him, will always know losing everything

 

i want my face pooled with water,

glittering back moonlight

of their names we won’t remember.

i want to know i can drown before

a bullet finds joy in speed.

 

i want you to know the last time i cried,

i was thinking about love & who i’d give

my last words & who’d make sure

the chrysanthemums were cremated too

& if i’d know a love that could send me off

with the kind of hurt a god gets off to—

not dying & dying & not.

 

hang my eyes above the gods

so they won’t have to get used to seeing

how i see my blackness is seen.

---

J’Sun Howard is a Chicago-based dancemaker and poet. He is one of the inaugural Co-MISSION Fellows at Links Hall and 2017 3Arts Make a Wave grantee. His poems are forthcoming in GIANTHOLGOY and have appeared in The Shade Journal, Propter Nos, The Body Manifold, Bird’s Thumb, 3rd Language, and Calamus Journal.