Untitled 2 (Namwick)
by Jason B. Crawford
In response to the act of a nigga saying nigga to a nigga:
Son, I am the stone carving you will always find cut in the middle of your throat / You can cough and hack and swallow trying to loosen me out but I have grappled every ounce of your esophagus; I will die here / Don’t bother giving me a funeral because I’ve been dead before / I know of ones made of the mouths you speak so violently / How dare you call me something you can’t hold, rough air stitched in unprocessed cotton / There’s not enough saffron and water to coat a baby ragged / And to give it new flesh would be a disservice to its mother, the fever tree, rooted, hoping to not find another of her children left a funny jaundice thing / But you use this history like a toy / You like to play with me around your tongue until you think it’s time to spit out / Yet I am the aftertaste, a smooth set of spikes digging into the palate / Tell me child, does your mother know ghosts see you as an offering to make white / To tear the flesh until it is only the meat left unseasoned / More and more I’m finding your voice to sound like a snow storm / That is to say I hear the white when you call my name / A murder of crows flocking from the windpipe when you speak me up / It will crawl itself into a noose and wait for someone to push on the other side, stay left hanging from a tree like a burning flag’s wet dream / Like a country built on the bones of a ship filled with fingers / Or a bone ship full of fingers not ready to build a country
Son, I am the stone carving you will always find cut in the middle of your throat / You can cough and hack and swallow trying to loosen me out but I have grappled every ounce of your esophagus; I will die here / Don’t bother giving me a funeral because I’ve been dead before / I know of ones made of the mouths you speak so violently / How dare you call me something you can’t hold, rough air stitched in unprocessed cotton / There’s not enough saffron and water to coat a baby ragged / And to give it new flesh would be a disservice to its mother, the fever tree, rooted, hoping to not find another of her children left a funny jaundice thing / But you use this history like a toy / You like to play with me around your tongue until you think it’s time to spit out / Yet I am the aftertaste, a smooth set of spikes digging into the palate / Tell me child, does your mother know ghosts see you as an offering to make white / To tear the flesh until it is only the meat left unseasoned / More and more I’m finding your voice to sound like a snow storm / That is to say I hear the white when you call my name / A murder of crows flocking from the windpipe when you speak me up / It will crawl itself into a noose and wait for someone to push on the other side, stay left hanging from a tree like a burning flag’s wet dream / Like a country built on the bones of a ship filled with fingers / Or a bone ship full of fingers not ready to build a country
Jason B. Crawford is black, bi-poly-queer, and a damn force of nature. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High Shelf Press, Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, he is the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. His chapbook collection Summertime Fine was a Short List selection for Nightingale & Gale and won the 2020 Varient Literature chapbook contest. Jason is also the recurring host poet for Ann Arbor Pride.
A 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, Jason's poem can be found in Issue 20 of Glassworks.
