FROM "DEAR WHITENESS"

In a dream I asked my auntie if I could touch the moon. Everyone was wearing pretty blouses and skirts except for me. My mom and sister took off, leaving me behind. It was snowing. I saw a cluster of fleas. They were soldiers. They yelled, Come out! Listen to our speech! I didn’t know what speech was. Speech was scary. Commies! Bastards! Not even human! Not better than dogs! The fleas scattered, then began spitting at us. Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! Speech was scary. I was the only one wailing in my dream. Then I was hungry. I asked my auntie if I could touch the Milky Way.

ART TK

Roula Nassar, the myth of abundance, 2019, color pencil on paper, 11 x 22 inches.

from DEAR WHITENESS,

CHARIF SHANAHAN

Early on The sun formed a borderless room. Colors

Broke through the light In small patches

Of body: a brown forearm, A tan cheek, a green iris,

A ginger stretch of something and so on. We had been waiting, but did not

Know we had been waiting. It was difficult to see the whole. It was,

It turns out, a birthing room, my birth room. Still Forming, I lifted you up:

Here, I said. Take this one. Let this one be my face.

Flat expressions, barely a reaction As if to say Of course. What else would you have chosen?

I handed you over to the authorities Asking them, repeatedly, to hold you

For me. They tried, they failed. You slipped through their fingers

As you would through mine— Not like water, or sand, but like

The air around us, yes, More like that: without

The illusion of containment. In the unformed liver: static silhouettes, a depressive.

In the middle distance: Brother, my brother—

Well what happened is I was walking down the street and I entered a kind of dream state, right? And in that dream I slept many nights and each night as I slept a spider crawled into my mouth. It lodged itself in my throat and in the morning no matter how much I coughed, how much water I drank, how long I held my breath, it did not budge. It was fixed. When I spoke my voice exited my mouth with a faintly visible gray hue. The room filled with that voice until it looked eventually as though the air had a color.

On every wall of that school, Between each tile, On our shoes, in the nuns’ hair.

In the milk glass, on the milky glass, On our bones, in our bones (even the jagged baby teeth

Our gums kept losing), In the brightness of our sclera, On the notebook pages that once were

Trees, we learned, on which we were Free to scribble our brilliant ideas About racecars-come-to-life

Or the magic elevator that traveled To a plane of existence Recognizably human but not on any map,

Our precious little right Brains, so certain then

Of you:

A radiant cloak, an aura

The eye detects before it sees

Beneath it.

When I spoke I heard my voice at a distance, as though it were coming from another room. The sensation was strange until it felt familiar, which is to say safe, which is to say contained, which is to say within my control. I spent my days sitting on a backless stool, looking out a bricked-up window. The voice from the other room told me things I did not know I knew, things I believed I did not believe.

I chased you for twenty-five years. At the bathroom mirror.

In the drug store thick. Feral, Obsidian, I held my breath.

Pale. Blanched, paling. Where were you?

At least half these cells Were you, were they not?

And now The teacher of life insists

It is important to recollect The half of me

That could never Despite my body and the need

Of those around me Present itself as the whole,

Not convincingly, In any case— The teacher explains After recollection, re-imagine:

But how to make one See what one does not see

With the vast ubiquitous discerning eye? How To dismantle a machine

One cannot touch or even locate—?