overunder
JFK Randhawa
Close your eyes. Wait.
Dear thread, before you read this, close your eyes. Swallow, blue sky of your throat.
The body is met by a field, a flip of the sky pop
lavender to claret.
The body is met by field, marked by the sky, a crater and water
it brings from the west west west until you’re east:
song is the body, and so defamiliarizes. It waits for sand, thread, those
excavations, migrant molecular composites. A cow tongue finds salt in the seams,
sends warm air steaming into winter night. Go. Wherever you are, rise and go.
Dear thread, you pass, pluck up from the back, repeat calling the water
wait——
to borrow, to pass through and so gives up to unknown futures.
I’m around, somewhere in the rain, missing you.
Until you’re cracking bone
against the boulder there was no boulder,
this recasts itself as winter yielding line hands out in the dark——
naming you before I could pull apart the braid how loneliness is resource,
regime, some thing inflicted and coming in waves, points strung by those with a power to
consolidate
access—— these things needle and liquify our equatorial
seam sipping bodies with fists——
you luminous shadow have known.
I will write that time is a container for parity. That it is inequitably distributed and policed.
But first I’ll sleep it then I will wonder where to go with my hands out.
I could go toward closing the gap of time between our bodies:
reaching around your shoulder to put a glass in the sink while you rinse lentils, one, two, three times. I do not wait, to be touch, to be the husked sound of your hand in the grain. There, I do
not wait to be late:
arriving two hours after our cousinbrother’s wedding
ceremony started, walking back gate for a
weeknight dinner gathering, two cities too south, 10 pm.
Dear thread,
but we arrive two hours early just to sit in the room humid with
nearly boiled tea, and nod off while in a past the wall and the lamps, someone wraps
the cloth of you around their head
circle tuck, circle tuck, close your eyes——
in some kind of rain I could touch you and trail the gaps between your knuckles
the hot hollow of
reworked sand in your mother’s sweat, eighty years
ago, on another continent of blood at your back——
Dear thread,
how do we approach the tension? But I’m still around, missing you
beaming you in——
Blue sky of your throat.
The body is met by
—————————————————
and a flood
Knot, rise:
Jhani/JFK Randhawa moves, collaborates, and makes through studies of disruption, hybridities, imperialism, memory, dreams, and human entanglements with the nonhuman. J’s work has appeared in publications such as Figure 1, O BOD, DoubleBlind Magazine, PRISM international, baest journal, TAGVVERK, and LA VAGUE, and in venues such as The Mortuary, Thymele Arts, El Cid, and the Woolen Mill Gallery.
Online: @qjhanip / http://jfkrandhawa.com