Staceyann Chin

Warm Rain

Listening to Democracy Now! online.

democracynow.org

It's more summer than winter in Brooklyn and June Jordan has been on my mind.

writing of her
reading her

pushing me to pull the new show out my ass
my ass is decidedly wider

it's good to be awake

quarter of one
I am not sad

just alone with the click click of these keys

and Amy Goodman guiding me through the maize
of this hard

rain of politics
and finding out how Jamaican
I am

how America has inserted itself into my mouth

my body twisting
with the clash of these borders

how is Border/clash as a title for the new show?

we trying to mount this motherfucker
at 45 Bleecker

in August
2004

I be loving my life
in small moments

memories of how I love tunnels
and the train from Westmoreland to Kingston

peanuts
warm from the whistling cart

a man with no face
sold us small treasures

my grandmother and the oranges
my brother
who knew everything about the sound of us moving

our small bodies not quite wanted by most
we survived

because Grandma decided not to go to America
I learned to read
to trust my own voice
as valid

because she stayed
because my mother left

because the smell of a polished red floor still brings me to weeping for all I no longer remember
of bruised mouths smarting from the stain of a green mango
eaten with salt
and pepper

and apples that do not taste like America
barefoot and rocks
in a place called Paradise

why would a place like that be called Paradise?

and my grandaunt
doing the best she could with the wild child
and her strange ideas of God
and reading of angels who wear brassieres

I read my way out of Paradise
good thing there are tunnels

and trains to take us over
the cross is crazy

borders beating my immigrant ass
with mango sauce made from sweet/sauce
and added to french toast

eaten in DC
June is the kind of place a girl could retire
and Karma is the center of all these choices

sometimes a girl has to wrap her spirit round all the rocks that life throws

bus' yuh arse
if you can't move your feet real quick-like

dance through tunnels
speak the jive-talk

walk the ranch walk

Holland Tunnel
Battery Tunnel
Midtown Tunnel

I love tunnels
they make some people wary of the water
and what lies outside the walls

for me

the soft litany of lights
running series along the length of the journey

the hopeful glimmer at the pinpoint of destination
the quiet ensuing

the radio
muted

slow motion of things not quite the shade you know them to be
Tunnels

soft
Anna Devere-Smith soft

coming
taking you somewhere

Paradise Redefined
lost to the struggle agaisnt self
and being thirty

and trying to tell myself it's ok to be all of three decades
who the fuck came up with a words like

decade?

ten years and you begin to decay

three times that and you have to announce you are still alive
not rotting like they imply
you should be

flesh
not the resilient freshness
of a single decade

or two
but the sturdy madness of three
one score and ten

and then some
and the years keep coming

and I have never been a fan of needles and stuff that makes you look
like a teenage boy

annorexia is no longer invited to my table
most days I eat all kinds of flesh

turgid with the plump of living
night is easier

longer when I am alone
but manageble

I fancy I might outlive these fears
afterall

maybe find a word or two not colored by the politics of America
under my tongue

maybe spit out some other thing
sounding more like the me I miss when I am alone

mutt of experience
child of a mother in Germany
father from China

Brother in Austria
lover from Chicago

heart/break in New Orleans
my words come from all these places

the smell of me traveling the continent of Asia
only in my dreams

I am yet to see
India

How can one long for a place not even seen in the mind's eye of History
I long to walk through the streets
of Calcutta

see Arundhati Roy's God of small things
in motion

smell the brown
colors
the silk made by invisible child fingers

the ache of it

India

exoticised bloom of the west
are you all we long for

New Dehli?
are the Mangoes fictive?

Do you smell like Westmoreland?
land of Indians in Jamaica

Night time
and I am nattering away
pen archaic in this idea of a weblog

all these journals online
and I am still writing in a leatherbound book

leather
and India

and why we treat animals like they could only be food

and I love a good piece of bacon
fried medium
with French Toast
eggs little bit harder than easy

Paradox of reasons
and a paradise I clutch at in memory

Histories I am rewriting
and parallel possibilities shifting out of pause

two a.m.
and it is no longer raining

the silence is as beautiful
as you and me
laughing

peace, poetry, and the pursuit of a non-fictive paradise,
Staceyann

Posted by staceyann at May 11, 2004 01:37 AM