“anon” by Adebe D. A.

I fear my words might be asking the same thing:

how to resist closure, how to display my sensibility

the sensuousness on starched pages and have it speak

to the concerns of my sisters and future children.

to desire to either fix or destabilize my own name.

I fear my poems argue for identity, to burn their own

brandings when spoken aloud but are too young

to know what they are. that they will come to me

one day from the shore drained of self no longer able to

speak the right tongue but what else should I expect

from this black body/white body/mixed-up confused body

who was never in the mind of Ginsberg’s generation

destroyed by madness as he said in 1956. I fear the empty

fix I’m looking for will tie me down forever to that old bag

of tricks called choosing against context. I know that same

context drenched in history will come lash me with fire,

the types of fire that do not speak of love but would sober up

even Bukowski and the jazz poets is an unforgiving rattling

of bones. I fear those bones will be mine, anonymous,

underground and silenced, that I will be made into

an anonymous poem, that the myth of every document

signed anonymous being a woman is true and so I must wait

in the old style for the other to understand each line. these lines

frontlines in my hands in another language another sea pouring out

into a river as praisesong. it is not that I fear walking across water

but that the water may erase others’

marks on the sand.

Works Cited

  • D. A., Adebe. anon. Canadian Literature 196 (2008): 95. Print. (HTML)