Lessons on Starvation
Your mother will compliment your figure
As psychosis pokes through the hips
‘A historical materialist analysis of generational starvation: a comedy’
Walk over to the lamp post and call out his name
Paris streets stank of barbecue and empty roosts
Brown bodies learn to float in all bodies of water
on coasts of the new and old world
Its called modernity
and the end of everything post-post.
Do people really believe they have better things to do than struggle?
Lovers can whisper about imperialism, if you want them to
You can scream in the light, if you need to
We lie about our youth, just feel out flashbacks and trauma.
God is blessing all those that feel negritude the most.
Doing the most.
Inshallah.
To die totally alone in our rooms
As the rub of subway doors hits along the seam of your jacket
Threatening “to open up”
Let it
Sniff into the glass and smell the poison
Drink deep
Condos and psych hospitals side by side so that you may find your way
Baby boy’s mind shattered in the brothels of Puebla
Border Indian casinos for white anxieties
Unanswered Messages
Would you want my youth wrapped around your cock?
Love is fickle and forces one into the balminess of memory
just to remember, it is a false memory you’re looking for.
I got so busy looking at the past when
I forgot to look up at the changing of the leaves
The people want their anthems and
Their black women, like their horses
Being beat,
Feeling no pain.
Devil makes three:
Can you let black and brown people be righteous
when they’re alive or will you continue to place artificial flowers at electronic wakes?
It doesn’t matter what ‘it’ is or whether ‘it’ could let ‘us’ be
But rather it was
Communism as a place we could get to
And the love we could never realize
And asking the question “can I fit inside you?”
Everyone has told me to be with you only if I could give you
everything that I told you I could not give you
You continue to complain of cold houses
These are all lies.
Like the color of his eyes.
Like the lines of a Whitney Houston interview of a Diane Sawyer.
White women have told me I couldn’t have pleasure
And I plunged deeper and deeper into train lines
where crust punks and hobos go to die.
It keeps me up at night
Thinking of all the times I should have slapped you
And I didn’t
When will you accept blackness as the
Exterminating Angel
And that there is joy in burning shit
With abandon.
Nothing left to say
There are definite tasks
Behind all that earth, behind all that cement
that lines prison and school yards
Where does God lie
When I cannot touch you?
I could count on a child’s hand the months and years
that it takes to amount to hegel’s infinity
It is an equation with no answer and no future
Is it suppose to feel like this?
Am I supposed to be like this?
Queen of aches
I won’t be here forever, especially once I delete this account
Why call it social media? Can’t you call it what it is like:
Wasteland, and other space and other blank spaces like
“That really hurt_____, I didn’t want it that way
but you made me. _______, you already knew about me, baby.”
And who knew God could sneak into those tiny spaces.
I tried to find you in the picture of hanging flowers
Feeling hard up and frustration sticking you in the side like Brutus’s dagger
But I was Julius crying for you to come back or at least take me with you
I keep telling you it’s not your fault, it’s not my fault
It’s no one’s fault
And it’s all our blame
And the historical process of
Marcus Garvey park jutting into me like a monolith
Jasmine Gibson is a Philly jawn now living in Brooklyn and a soon to be psychotherapist for all your gooey psychotic episodes that match the bipolar flows of capital. She spends her time thinking about sexy things like psychosis, desire and freedom.
Tschabalala Self builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black female body. The artist constructs exaggerated depictions of female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The exaggerated biological characteristics of her figures reflect Self’s own experiences and cultural attitudes toward race and gender. “The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise,” Self has said. “I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.”