is a finger pointing at
the sky
in its socket
is an amethyst
you and I
quicksilver
or your beast?
a finger pointing
is the bullet
is the bullet
towards my head?
the bullet is
my head splattered
these colors
pull my heads from
carnival games
to a place I will
et is the beast
Brute?
of Bethlehem
Soweto,
Gaza,
ravenous
An array of
livery,
The mucous
Ready
prepared for
wire,
is a sculpture
behind us
of the cliff
Blow a wind
Is your castle
Time?
then
to be
the story I tell.
is a bullet
small
I’m not
if I say it,
true I’m
witness to
this
forgetful
I, I
know
and then?
is an eyeball, rotating
like a man brought to climax
potion I drink and then clap then
disappear,
the name of your deity
burning
backwards at its palm
moving forward?
fast or slow
except
a paintball is
pink matter I dream of
nightly the goblins
baskets they are
sideshows labyrinths
never go. The bull-
of Guernica. Et tu
and the brute
slouches, brute of Charleston,
brute of Elmina, Minneapolis,
brute of the Mediterranean, swallowing,
ocean of red.
rifles a bouquet of battle
your liver eaten by what?
we call war.
or not here we come
war another word for
barbed. The trigger
we pull
towards the edge
of the castle.
and it cascades.
tall enough to withstand
Tell me
tell me again I’m wrong
so trusting of
The story
is my brain in five
pieces. If I say it that means
doing it so
that means I’m not
something else and you are
this something
shattering, yet
velocity
will not end
until it ends
With gratitude and debt to Yusef Komunyakaa’s “You and I Are Disappearing,” Tyehimba Jess’s contrapuntal poems in leadbelly and Olio, Evie Shockley’s “les milles,” W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” The Fugees’ “Ready or Not,” Natalie Diaz’s “Catching Copper,” Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, George Abraham’s Birthright, Frank Ocean and André 3000’s “Pink Matter,” William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Hamlet, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness & Being, and Bob Marley and the Wailers’ “War.”
//Isaac Ginsberg Miller is a PhD Candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also a member of the Poetry and Poetics Graduate Cluster. His chapbook Stopgap won The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest and was published in 2019.