*
when i am gone
& these fiber optics still ignite
as an ad for Nike
what then?
my gamma-tendrils spreading
over the hills like a klepto—
i wasn’t looking to be saved
when the maple-sprouts shoot
through a slit in the page
so my eyes can hatch
in a village along the tree line’s polychrome-
shimmer—
i scrape myself out of
the velvet-
pram in the glade-chafe
where this child-corpse deposits its mineral-
ring
before falling—
i hop a fence
& core the photoplasm from the book
like the purest cut of factory-
black—
for a thimble-breath of darkness
outside the sentence
i lift the veil
so my nematode-
sprites can get a whiff of empire—
when the first solar rose
repeats in the hillside’s optic-
nerve
we wring the image from the model like
a dye
& chew on its viscera
*
in the strife-brane
that plush-
polyp quaking in the corner
you can call him rabbit-rabbit
& this dog-body
lays a gimp-
leg against our monitor to rest which
tickles like a rumor
the white-latex-
sky sucks up
my ghost
folding-shut behind me
i know better
but my coding says
i’m attracted to the blacklight like you
when i hear the voices
scratched-out of a village-
twerp
but continue to chew the wheat-cake-of-empire
i hang my
snout
low with the look of a dry-wood-
spigot
in the hyper-strife
this humble
roach
likes to scree in its concave
grove
where my forest-
cock raises its mossy
neck its cleft-
chin
suddenly so concerned about the world!
already searching
splat-splat
in the satellite-
dust instead of here
& here in the ream-
ecology where we hurt the most
the rack-master soaks
his feet in our vinepaste
& our sprouts huddle under
his translucent-
spit-dangle
by spookfall
it’s a fern-dangle
our tartaric-
beaks
wailing in the finch-
weed
*
hey you yapping outside my quartz-fat
pushing through the membrane of the oak
shut up—
our orphan-bodies blink-
blinking along the pike-wood-
bristle
under the escort of the gendarme
clenching on all sides—
waking we
are not the same
child extracted from the root-prism
when together the alloyed genitals
shoot
the pain secretes
an emerald curving geometric
feeling
the floodlights dissimulate
in rushes
of figuration breaking-apart
like—
in our nest
the ammo-lobe-we-call-commander kisses
our cordite casings
so we feel wanted
before leaving at dawn
to drop our bullet-
pupae at the feet of the missile-chief
to split the gate
of the seven-house-village
before loading its excretion to the returner-
body
—you didn’t know
we could get here together
sometimes me sometimes
a zero-dark-
twerk above the furrows of the silicone-
field
where we blank the roads
blank
the distance
blank-blank
the tile-patch twisting in the yard
blank-blank
the light winking-shut in the river-wood-
filigree
blank-blank
up above
but making the ammo-lobe very angry
our drone-sound tears
through the surface of the page—
w-w-we didn’t know
we needed each other
but years go by—
& still we track through the empire s-s-
circuit
the same c-conifer
the s-same
obelisk—
when i can’t stop you
from seeing me this way
our glands sew
the silicone into a cord
you can pull
if you need a meal
if you need
anything—
sometimes me sometimes
you
inside us
together
Note: Sections from the above excerpt were originally published at Black Warrior Review and Burning House Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Madison McCartha is a black poet and multimedia artist whose work appears (or is forthcoming) in Black Warrior Review, Dreginald, The Fanzine, Full-Stop, The Journal, jubilat, Yalobusha Review and elsewhere. His work has received support from Winter Tangerine, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and was shortlisted for the 2019-2021 CAAPP Creative Writing Fellowship. Madison holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and, in the fall, will be pursuing his PhD at the University of California–Santa Cruz.
ABOUT THE MANUSCRIPT
The position of each part within this whole […] each specific Plantation […] to understand the hidden order […] so as to wander without becoming lost.
— Édouard Glissant
Put plainly: I needed to imagine practices of art-making that could give someone like me the subversive permission to be. Disinterested in traditional performances of black identity, Freakophone World became a series of occult recordings, hauntings, and invocations performing new black diasporic identities in an increasingly globalized and imperiled society. The speaker in this poem comes from a long tradition—of freaks, outsiders, others, and spirits calling out to the living reader from the undead, black, and unapologetically freakophonic space of the text. At times Afrofuturist, weird and intensely intimate, this is an unruly, resistant poetry whose infectious speaker utters itself as a speculative other, and whose textual body is itself a diaspora.
This poem also speaks into a larger body of writing—one that pulses at the intersection of race, technology and the occult—signaling expressions of blackness that subverts their mediating technologies. Lately, I’ve been working on an interface for the book capacious enough to occupy that body.
Because the technology I want to subvert most, here, is empire.