MAGGIE PUT HER FOOT INTO ASSATA’S HAND
Imagining law or water, mortared, maybe hollow
I’ve stepped over wall into water’s bridle
An unbridgeable routine of reinvention—
If we took structure between our fingers, nimbly
rolled its bulk upside down, we would hear an aerial alarm
racing to meet the sunrise, and you would be a child
a folded record of a child whom, an imagined I, being also
Child, ached to belong to as a pet, or, to pulse inside of—
Peel my stocking off. Under-slept makes tulip
spectral, accident in a cup on the crate table—
Pinch knee scatter petals, potential pregnancy
intensifying the will to neglect—
In the bell tent someone said I’ll say back what you
said, you: I will yoke myself to the ghost and promise—
My memory broke against the formation of officers
stalking through mist, foreclosing the city
Was I harness or diffuse like the blue advancing mistaken light
on my back, braced by your shin and your shark in my mouth—
A backlit assembly whispering
If you say below, I’ll sink to you—
In supplication, my vanity and endurance—
A theorist across the horizon chronicles workers who shuttle
their tongues across blindfolded bodies prostrated against linoleum,
detained biological excesses of the state
When I thought I was writing the shark, the shark was writing me
When I thought I was enduring the One, the one was enduring me
There is footage, I’ll find it for you
Give me a minute—
Helicopter whine, yaw in the sky
I thought minutes were simple.
We thought leaps were fierce, I forgot we are not language—
That’s enough for the law, its purchase on misdirection
Catchment of a tongue unsticking means
bone remembering it was once stone and before that
Summoning horse through shark, in the toneless accompaniment
to my undressing, one rib at a time one gill one lock one holy thread
The many becoming one, the one becoming you—
Horses run along the shore of all I cannot feel
How I never was closer to breath to sound to clean incision
of the last sound
Be with it now
Jhani Randhawa lives and practices between England and the unceded Pocomtuc and Wabanaki territory in Massachusetts. Their work centers the performative uses of literature, archival marginalia, and bodies to play at the limits of various systemic forces. Jhani’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in outlets such as Osmosis, Gulf Coast, A Mouth Holds Many Things: A Hybrid Literature Anthology, ASAP/J, 128 Lit, and O BOD. Their debut collection Time Regime won the 2023 California Book Award for Poetry. You can learn more about Jhani's work at www.jfkrandhawa.com and their editing at www.rivulet.net