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Zeno Scott :: Three poems

 


auto-epistle I

dressed in gossamer,

(never spun yourself)...

svelte and expansive

(all at the same time)...

existing in trinity of saturated persona

yet,

refracting thru stagnant mirror

water

only parting to placata our thrashing

phantom limb...

calculating in letter

to see the carcass lessened by the mind

attempting to swallow ethos like antidote & assimilate into some streamlined factory facility in the deep North...

Dear, dear other-self

just once get your ass out the water and swim like me

i beg you, my nigga

tune in, bc im comin thru the static...

you may think me an enemy but

we steady on the one

we drumming wrongly on the one

we growling in some belly on the one we floating into purgatory, breech on the one we dipping our two in the drinking gorge on the one we drowning on the one

and we lash back on the one

for the one.


Backlog // Litany

[transmutation of To Graham Foust on the Morning of His Fortieth Birthday]

Subterrains exist in Harlem.

Pero like… the antebellum oddities

(dusk dressed in dunnage)

is the hill still made of sugar?

Ain’t no traveling back to glass houses –

the swelter musta fucked around and

turned them back to sand.

Congesting every cavity with carbohydrates,

you remember, fondly,

the treasure you once made of trash.

In anotha artless, representational nightmare

– we all know you made up – all the images are [secretly] inverted woodcuts.

Wilderness thick

with wenge falling a

whisper, every accidental click of my

tongue, a

memory.

Trauma ticks its own time.

Hyacinths eventually fade into

fists-fulla-finger.

Irreparable damage is, in essence, a

chemical change. Like

isn’t genetics the long-game of every culture but ours?

Anyway, what’s the dictionary definition of silence?

In the etymology of my invention,

Cambium implies vast and vascular

change.

The obsolete function of my everlasting tuck.

Swan song after swan song after…

I guess there’s an oscillating overstimulation in observing your object from over here,

the same old overstimulation exists in old growth. There is no happiness like being the fat kid and loving it. Nothing as delightfully bitter as sitting with yourself. Yourself.

Yourself.

A reluctant rapping.

3 sister squeezes and I am reminded

of a kiss on the battlefield.

Recall the rough and routine of your

rifle?

The sabertooth of your

sythe?

And what’s more mestizo than a Black body’s delight with the odor of dried tobacco?

Finally, you can spew the sermon –

“Dear God: How many bent knees will it take for you to get off?

Slow sunrises stumble over another swing, you wake up on your stomach again.

Every scar a callous.

Neutral subjects are white well-meaning & washing my colors in bleach.

On the cusp // that fixture between maybe and you wish mmmm – the shanty sung really depends on outlook.

Said shanty is to be sung by a Viking with locked hair, or a high-yellow bed-wench that saunters around

Massa’s house during peak-picking-time just to end up breastfeeding two white-babies

at-once.

Dreams dim, a dank puddle of bong water...

Yeah I admit, suicide was just a face card

to be played as a lesson

straight flush

straight face

cigar plume aerating an aureole around me and me

alone.

I lied about sleepwalking;

and drinking straight from the carton;

and allegedly being alarmed by an amber-tinted photo of my missing self

– an imaginary dream – invented out of

necessity like

stroking my chest incessantly or plugging my ears like the sockets they most certainly are.

Oh that’s what you mean by extra?

This fidgets?

Nine snakes molded from drama entrance you, you lie before blue light to emit a

whiff of yourself.

Soon the sky will spread far enough to touch you but it will feel a swarm.

Anyways,

who else could hold dominion over Sunday?

Nothing rouses my bulge like the taxederm senator adorning my foyer.

Don’t we all gotta

attic fulla musty marble

austerity measures

that mirage of 40 acres?

[vibrato buzz of a microwave;

come in, shellshock.

Come in, alphabet soup

entity.]

Follow me —

follow and find folly in stepping on the cracks

as if your mother’s spine is umbilical.

And look at that —

some solstice in Savannah:

a pair of capsizing river boats buoy in a bog why?

Since dividing every 60 minutes into

15

digestible

4-minute

segments

I have made sure I never experience a second.

Humping my own body-shaped sweat-mark;

orange used to be the color of envy.

The Earth has become flat with doom,

but your cooing, dove? — flighty with love for me, and me, alone? —

still hums in the heads of transmission tower men, chainganged with telephone wire.

Who is you is me: in that I revel.

You will never hear my falsetto fade – but you will know I am gone.

Already wrote the last song I will ever sing.

Whether you slap your knees or not,

cry real tears or not —

I’m laughing so..

Who among our duet dances to dilate,

expanding into marrow, the breeding ground of blood. Shall I extract your left lung?

If a wailing serves as a song, kinda like a secret serves as a treasure, then what — treasure or no treasure — can we call the Primal Scream?

When all is said and done, you are both rod and cone now allow us to microscope mirrored cat eyes flickering from fenders.

O! Poor Patriot predisposition

still fussing over our individual right to

keep the gate...

Singing, both

my country tears of thee (steal away)

sweet land of liberty (steal away)

of thee I see (steal away)

land where my fathers died (steal away to Jesus)

land of the pilgrims pride (steal away)

from every mountainside (steal away home)

let freedom ring! (I haven’t got long to stay here.)

[beat]

venturecapitalistverse // pygmypoems

Offensive turns of phrase I made up.

I masticated. Vomited

every delicious morsel into the mouth of a baby falcon blue with

breathing.

Handful of leftover mandible.

What did you end up reading in my braille?

All the while I found you, a single, stray whisker.

Finding place cautiously, you locate the perfect odor and imprint

to recoil in.

I know I remember wrong

November and that Great Impregnating Gust

In LA, every turn of Earth is an indifferent spoke.

Refrain from beating the horse again again.

Refrain from turning the horse to beef.

Refrain from raping my syllabary, for once make love to my letter.

Refrain from the game of spinal tap.

Refrain from contorted courtesy –

chivalry a sliver of shiv in/to the womb.

Classic. Going backwards to attach alliteration,

a-little-lattice.

Unmatched the tawing of my hide in your sun.

My cell your microwave

the wanton nuking of another city that used to be

wartorn.

Where is that ever-flowing fountain?

That place with no viscosity where

the pennies never do anything but float and the wishes are washed up. Some call it Washington Heights.

Gimme a second, damn —

You act like time ain’t a poppet.

& God’s breath smelled somethin’ sacrilegious today as he spoonfed me a saccharine shallot.

Refusal to brush teeth before bed

the charcoal stain of my sink reminds me of

childhood stardom – in other words–

another nova gleams in my enamel

come morning.

Somehow you found yourself somewhere

in the sepia-tinted whiteness of TV Land generations passed & you’ve been meaning to drive-by the Brady Bunch house.

I called your disconnected number for four more years after you ripped yourself from the phonebook.

Will Time ever put back on his uniform and fight?

like...

is you a nigga or is you a bitch? boypussy electric in tension. like...

I’d let him fuck if he wasn’t so busy asking for receipts. bill-collector // boner-killer

mostly hard – as hard as we can be – when comparing growth in centimeters as if a bird’s eye view of the body is the right choice.

Notecard deck of microexpressions to feign feeling.

I don’t need those anymore.

The peacock theatrics of my father, anything but creative. If anything.

Coming a carpenter

carving off-center concentrics out of splintery naps.

Cellar full of slag, mechanical bagpipe pistons

ringing alarm.


auto-epistle II

“Aint you colored? as in,

outside the borders of the

unsaturated mirage

we call

purity or

natural order or

attractive composition?

though you may only recognize your own burn

in locales subsumed by the blinding white shadow

i am it.

[beat]

and of course

you recall my formlessness?

with its decadent array of derivatives

punctuating the pregnant pauses

of each transmuted phrase?

and I’m sure

you have appreciated my cunning?

with its distilled repertoire of

mutation, amending your ability

to hold hostage those very same pauses?

poor boy,

thuggish in unwanted tint,

what will become of you

without me?”

 

 

 

 

Zeno Scott is Trans Wordsmith & Woodworker based in Los Angeles, by way of Harlem. Zeno is currently a first-year MFA student at CalArts, studying Creative Writing and Performance in the Critical Studies school.

As an Afro-Latinx language enthusiast who has lost his Spanish tongue, Zeno’s recent work focuses on monolingual translation; highlighting the power of language to mutate, like queerness can, depending on the speaker and eventually, the reader. Zeno's work attempts to simultaneously pay homage and lovingly critique the work that inspires and moves him.

This submission is a long transmutation of Graham Fousts’ auto-epistle To Graham Foust on the Morning of His Fortieth Birthday. Also attached, before and after the transmutation, are two auto-epistles from Zeno's first collection, wetlocked mat of heritage [i call a scalp].

 

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