By Rickey Laurentiis
via the Poetry Foundation
-
CHECKPOINT
And have known some privilege.
CHECKPOINT
And have seen some freedom.
CHECKPOINT
I mean, I told myself No, you shouldn’t compare it—myself to Palestine—no, I—
CHECKPOINT
But I compared it, drew that Wound, leaned into a kind of pity so new to me who—
CHECKPOINT
—was so used to being all base & bottom of the world; I tried, but felt that distant, thieving love dilate my eyes.
7.
And I cried, softly.
8.
So what I had not asked for, did not want this. So what. I thought Tears cheapened it, sissy’d it. So what.
But was a new privilege I met as salt Slipped, downed and furthered my face, an
AMERICAN
And then Black
privilege began to describe me. Imagine that! I was some doubler consciousness again,
me watching four boys swing their joy on an old couch-on-wheels
Before that Wall’s forestalling future, so who greeted them first was my tears; they’re playing a game.
9.
A song: Palestine keeps a divided home, where Blackness only roams.
10.
The tears! But panic I could call a film for this frame that’s guilt, the next is friendship: Am I what in Palestine?
Or is it my “voice” insisting the story, by certain marks, in whisperings—What do I mean
by Spirit?—of warring, intifada, blood like Dew in the fields….
The story is true.
- THE WALL
Killings are thrilling, the Wall said, and casual:
(1) little infant trying—;
(2) women in their—;
(3) dogs sleeping;
(4) boys.
—What do I mean by Spirit?— The birth of a nation means always the death of a former one.
12.
Sitting here near ole Bayou Road, again all spleen. The Palestinian men I try with my eyes stare back half-meanly; they don’t know I know they know I’m trans—but I am the lady, herself, within. Fiercely her walk pierces a New Orleans’ slick night. They like it.
-
THE WALL
But I was saying the birth of a nation means always the death of a second one.
Israel is real, trifling, in someone’s mind.
I felt that. I was persuaded. The film peeling across my eyes, only one Palestine,
Made protest against this fact untenable, as if myself I could see in those fields,
Saw to the theft and strangle of myself.
SOLIDARITY EXISTS
What’s solid in solidarity? All I know is still nooses, crosses; still thorns—then it was white phosphorus forming the quick shadow of a boy called Freedom—in whispering, in curtains mark —I’m somehow a distance from.
Admission is a later knowledge, I think. A right of return.
16.
A slower knowledge. To know it was my want to see myself as that boy I was seeing, that ache again and in myself to be, blackerache, the one most hurt.
17.
Admission is a graver knowledge, I think, trick privilege, instance when, tonight Maryam reminds me,
Recalled to just-that-where White phosphorus is made.
“Arkansas, baby! oh, yeah—”
18. CHECKPOINT
18.CHECKPOINT
Light slides across the face of a body. Dark does.
-
CHECKPOINT
The next shot is familiar:
rows of cotton dipped in historical red; burnt cork; crows; rows of bullets ripped into some resembling, slum skin, ache—
But—
CHECKPOINT
—Try again: they are soldiers I am seeing, Israeli, only the present tense, I should’ve said this years ago.
I should’ve made this article confession, spelled out between poem and novel years ago. Tall lyric, a space of briar ambition and its mess of all the violences witnessed—
21.
—and the beauty.
I should loathe this gravity, of those violences, these easy collisions I make from item to idea or like to like.
But I love to like, to raise the lyric analogy and have you consume: the way an eye carries down the page; down the shallow energy of my head voice now; because I bid it do, to the hilt—
-
SEMICOLON
—to the silt. These built up semicolons, the top dot like the soldier’s rifle target, the comma dangling for how the dead do give pause, I should hate it;
I should spit, I should—
WANT
—need the harder thinking, which is rigor gammed with care, the possibility of that, that’s all, unmannered, uneven—
Like some New Orleanian unique South, that occupies the psychot of my brain’s desire, words I worry into existence.
FREEDOM BEGS
Let’s say the freedom of poetry can be the danger of it, could be the draw? So what?
Tried in Jerusalem; tried in Hebron—
But I saw everything I needed to see in the labored chain-work of the overhanging canopy that keeps—those whisperings, certain marks—rocks from falling on the shopkeepers’ heads;
Took a video of the Palestinian man who said, “Go back. Tell it.”
Who wants a pacifying gospel delivered knows I cannot please them, knows I cannot sincerely stop these telling tears.
NIGHT-WALKING WOMAN
Yet I walk, eyes like a lady’s reminded to my purpose with truth. Palestine cries a divided home, where Blackness bedamned to roam, and we share a Dome.
Friend, look in my eyes. To have no home is yet a difference from the denial of return, and don’t we both ache for home?
Slavery is true; as Occupation remains true; as a sky cross-stitched and beaded with turning danger is true:
Together our nights singly moan.
27.
I mean, I have not stopped this ego rolled down my cheeks and who asked for witness?
-
WITNESS
I first saw myself as the shame I took fully for myself, those years ago—
But was written away from it
29.
A free world, I think, is possible. I am persuaded.
I saw it in the still-for-singing beauty of the land, how Palestine makes a gold hum in my mouth. Saw it in the not-now-warring, rolling hills of Ramallah my feet at least tried to walk frankly in and felt—
CHECKPOINT
—yes, a resonance. What could I imagine now?
CHECKPOINT
What new eyes could I claim?
CHECKPOINT
What must you admit, really, to be free?
CHECKPOINT
That I tried my body and thinking completely in that Palestine, so what.
CHECKPOINT
And was I wrong?
Notes
I first arrived in Palestine, through the Jordan corridor, with the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2016, accompanied by such elites as J. M. Coetzee and Saidiya Hartman. Though Hartman, the only other Black American on the caravan, passed through easily, I was barred for an hour at the first checkpoint. How come?
Where I mention “doubler consciousness” I refer to W. E. B. DuBois’s theory of Black persons’ double consciousness, which keeps divided interests between Blackness and what he called “Americanness” (or whiteness) ever within the confines of Black life. Can there be more?
Where I mention “slum,” see the aforementioned Saidiya Hartman and her expansive theory on the afterlives of slavery and their impact on what she calls the “fungible body.” The slum, she theorizes, is where we find such marked bodies. But is that the only place?
I want to thank Sharif Abdul Koddous and all the organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature; Kristina Kay Robinson, in whose seminal, performance project Republica: Temple of Color and Sound we meet Maryam DeCapita; and Ru Freeman, John Hennessy, and Emily Everett for all their various help in (re)shaping and shepherding this poem toward its present form. But is it done?
I'm Pegasus! I fetch the Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day and crosspost it to cohost. Find more details about me here.
the formatting of this poem gets a bit warped in this crosspost; i recommend reading it directly at the poetry foundation link