Poetry: “God Responds [to the Proust Questionnaire]” by Jubi Arriola-Headley

I.

In Queen’s Park in Bridgetown stands a baobab tree that’s abided nigh on ten centuries—rooted before the rise of the great Kingdom of Benin, struggled upward toward the light before Mansa Musa built mosque the first in Timbuktu. Once, companion grasses and grains of sand strew themselves upon the ground around her, la baobab, a gesture toward fealty; a grove of bearded figs (from which the island takes its name) stood sentinel. Now her nearest neighbor’s a car park and her once-fecund foothold is today an encasement of concrete, but she’s no less regal for it. The typical myth would have you believe it was chance landed her on distant shores, an errant seed carried away by the currents of the day. No, no; chance is a battered concept we old and wizened understand is nothing but lazy metaphysics. Imagine, rather, her sisters gathering up all the strength of their various branches of history and hurling that embryonic flash three thousand miles across the ocean, so her cousins would someday recognize those shores as a place you could make a home. Despite the concrete encasing your feat.

II.

My pronouns they/them, my gender
a comet, a cosmic snowball begging

to melt, a crush of gas and rock and dust
in orbit around what warms me. Round

my fists I spool thin ribbons of flamingo
scissored from the spectrum of sunburst.

III.

In the beginning, there was possibility. There sparked, between what was not and what now is, a moment, where anything might happen, any splendid wretched thing. Let me metaphor it for you: the tabby might’ve been rotting dead inside the box, or knitting a scarf for its auntie, or wailing away on a tambourine or trombone, or dead-set on clawing its way out, or the cat might not have been a cat at all, it could’ve been a banana leaf or an elephant or a typhoon or a cyborg or the box might have held only light and air. It’s not the moment before you take your first hit of your very first spliff that’s the shit; it’s the moment it hits you, when you’re overwhelmed by the flood, when you begin to understand how much you really don’t. How do you ever recover that high? How can you ever un-know descent?

IV.

An unadulterated (HA!) list of the ones of you I’ve truly loved (each name of which also appears on the ongoing list of folks I’ve thoroughly fucked)—

(I’ve had my share of scrapes with pricks named Paul.)

IX.

In the western highlands of Guatemala, where the volcanoes whip the groundwaters into an obscene heat, and the local boys boil their blues in lava-fueled pools to prove their mental, there’s a city the Maya call Xelajú. And in this city there’s a young girl, barely skirting the edge of seventeen—let’s call her

La Michelada.

She was born to a mother who wanted to love her. But the world being what it is, she struggled to be herself. The mother, the daughter. Her father wanted a boy. Her father insisted she embrace a boy. Her father tried to force a boy into her, but she would not. She would not. Oh, her stunning funk, her wondrous runtish. You know how the story goes—she’ll end up fending, scavenging. Her mettle will net her dependents, months younger than her. She’ll sell whatever she can stand to let men lay their hands on. She’ll bloom into a thing that means to be more than what surrounds it.

X.

Can you perceive your edges? Do you bleed and blend into the surrounding painscape? Some days I feel like my axiomatic sofa’s grafted onto my ass. Not that what you call a sofa is where I rest. Not that I’ve ever known rest. The “day” they say I did was an anxious one for me. I reconsidered every poem I’d ever made. What and why the aardvark? the antelope? the artery? the asterisk? I began at what I told myself was the beginning. I have no sense of where I end. I, anamorph, I parallax. What manner of mirror would one select to reflect the universe back unto itself?

XI.

Once, I strode down Whitechapel Road, as up from the gutters, or so I dreamed, tufts of turmeric wafted and drifted, cimarrón, toward the tip of my tongue, like dandelion seeds blown nomad by a wildling child, and catches of cumin tore at my nostrils, flared them like lust, parting them wide, they, wanting more than they could possibly take, and everywhere around me men in tunics, robes of spun sunshine, bright as weathered wool, walked, arms locked, clung, sung to each other in satin baritones, let fingers lay lovered on shoulders, claimed kisses as warriors do, as if they full knew the cost of softness and chose to pay it nonetheless, tendering in full view of the glory of a shop sign that read Bangladeshi Curry Centre and all I kept thinking was which God is theirs?

XII.

That Langston hangnail scribbled some vicious verse—without one friend, he said, alone in my purity, he said. That fucktoast. The nerve. Though he might’ve got it righter than most. And mine and Hughes’ views on purity and poetry are close.

XIII.

I am
a void
I’m ever
swelling

XIV.

No paradox here—Blackness

                is never an absence. No gesture’s ever gone, ever not; if it is, it’ll be and has been. No matter what the physics say—I am the ochre and umber wind-stripped from every marble mannequin; I’m every heavy leaden curse you’ve ever vespered to the wind, a blowball filament meant to take root wherever it lands, rout whatever sative species it encounters.

XV.

consider yourself a mountain
formed in the first of the fires & fissures
that shaped this place
yet I, then, must needs be
the river, simple, rippling, true

& simply course around you
or

if it better serve you
cast yourself the godhead
yet I will sing your sin                           your wedded excess

what faith can swaddle you safe

have you not heardthe gospel chorus

I shall not be moved

youvestigeapparitionnothing

dustsoon swept away

XVI.

You must see by now that I’m agnostic about the outcome. I can’t tell you how this ends. Not won’t; can’t. I’ve never been one to gamble; I cast no die that you can pin your sorry lot on. Chance is a sucker’s bet, every time. This bitch of a situation was created by y’all who did, and y’all who don’t. Ask yourself whose rules you’re beholden to. If some seedy bearded greedhead wants to hoard enough Bitcoin to mount a cockrocket straight to Mars, who’s to stop ’em? The baobabs are dropping dead, splitting time along their shriveling spines, not one by one as you’d expect but in some wicked chorus line, like it’s goddam 42nd Street up in here. If I won’t intercede, if I let their thirsty wood chips fall where they may, then please understand that where and when your teeth secede from your mealy mouth is of little consequence to me. I won’t lose a minute over you.

XVII.

Think of empire as a board game. There are two sets of rules. Rules the first: if you must go, make sure you go gentle. Get in line, in order of might. Raise your hand before you riot. Don’t you dare nod off in the middle of this sentencing. Pay your taxes right after you pay your tithes. You know they renew every year, right? You’re never done done, humdrum. You’ve been in arrears since before you were born. Are you listening? The future’s a privilege, not a rite; we’ll let you know when you’ve earned it.

XVIII.

Y’all keep pandering to the (d)rafters with that stacked deck if you want to.

XIX.

There’s a boy, maybe eight or nine years old, set out on his front stoop, reading a book—The Autobiography of Malcolm X. (He can’t barely imagine what he’s reading but that don’t daunt him; this summer he’ll end up reading it cover to cover, twice.)

The sun’s a screaming tangerine in the sky.

A car speeding down the street screeches to a freeze in front of the boy. Its screeeeeech sounds like bleating, puts the boy in the mind of a panicked animal. Looming. Dangerous. The man in the driver’s seat of the car turns to the woman in the passenger seat of the car and punches her in the face. Three times, in rapid succession, boom boom boom. (Years on, the boy, no longer a boy, forever that boy, will recollect each punch as accompanied by an audible boom, low and rumbling, troubling and trembling the earth around it, like thunder, like an edifice imploding.) The boy in the back seat of the car is no older than the boy on the stoop. In a single fluid movement, or so it seems to the boy on the stoop, the man in the driver’s seat retracts his arm, turns back to the steering wheel, and screeches off, as suddenly as he appeared.

XX.

Years on, in the myth the boy will wish into insistence, the man’s fist freezes, millimeters from the woman’s nose, blocked by some unseen force. The boy on the stoop raises his left hand from his lap; the book he’s reading slow-moes to the ground, spawning an audible boom as it hits. A sudden soundtrack backs the boy, black and blue music racing toward crescendo. The boy, his expression the square root of inscrutable, stretches his arm toward the man, works his fingers, and then, in a single, fluid movement, twirls his fingers into a fist of his own making. Being better versed in fairy tales and looney tunes than in life, the boy expects that the man’s fist will first stiffen to stone, then crumble to dust that floats away like petals from a flower on a windy day. You and I, of course, know better. The man’s hand is crushed and twisted into a mess of ripped skin and burst flesh and torn cartilage and broken bones and blood, blood everywhere. The man’s scream pierces the swollen air; he’s a panicked animal. Looming. Dangerous.

XXI.

Did you know that the word tangerine comes from the 18th century tangerino, signifying (and this is wild, child) a person from Tangier? Not at all the same root as tangent, which comes from the Latin tangere, to touch.

XXII.

I love a good tangent

XXIII.

I marvel at the middling things, the almost-missed: how on hundreds of corners in front of hundreds of corner stores, hundreds of men in ranging stages of inebriation are right now pounding down draughts, and dominoes on tables like they’re lashes on backs. They only want to be heard, these men. How what they call a table—a square of rain-warped plywood high-wiring atop a long-retired oil barrel—never flips from the force of this lift, this kick. How the dominoes shift, nervous, yet never straying too far from where they’ve been slapped into line. They know better than to protest. Dominoes is a game of balance, of restraint, of bounding toward the edge of a raging cataract and tumbling over instead of turning around and spraying those pursuing you with your graven verse. Wives, in peacetime, curse these men for not coming home to them. Not that they want them home—they’ve had all they can take of those crusty feet ripping their sheets and shins to shreds. But they want them to want to be.

XXIV.

In wartime mothers of sons curse their luck, wish they’d borne daughters. They forget they too were daughters, once.

XXV.

Y’all let your cities swallow stories whole.
Who among you knows whether Sly’s alive
or five feet under? FYI, the last

reported sighting: sweating in a tent
off Sunset, the latter half of twenty-
eleven. But who’d even give a good

me-damn, if you couldn’t package his fight
as a ninety-minute pilot? Like, who
among y’all longs to follow a subplot?

XXVI.

I once eavesdropped on a workshop wherein a person with pale-ish pink skin and ebony hair that ended in a flatline just below her earlobes who was known to slog her way around a verse said in response to a question (not directed to her, I might add) I hate questions and it was as if the room became a vacuum, no friction coefficient, and all the poets’ jaws dropped at the exact same speed and hit the floor at the exact same moment and the boom was inaudible depending on what you perceive hearing to be but nonetheless that day that crack shook the foundations of the craft. She (the person) made few friends that day, believe you me. That she made any at all is perhaps my greatest failing.

XXVII.

I long to be
thunderstruck
sting of open hand
landingfull-on cheek

XXVIII.

No, lower.

XXIX.

I can crack a joke and a whip with equal dexterity.

XXX.

Did you hear the one where the one who plays the wife asks the one who plays the husband, what would you do if we won the lottery? I’d take my half, says the husband, and I’d leave you before you could say “inheritance tax.” Great! says the wife. I won twenty bucks last night. Here’s ten. Stay in touch!

XXXI.

What if touch was
a victimless crime
Would anyone
touch me then

XXXII.

I once mused that if we knew who baked the first sweet potato pie we should make their name a day of the week and some critic (aren’t you all) suggested I was speaking rhetorically or ironically or hyperbolically or some other such shit-sense but what if—and hear me out—what if I wasn’t? There’s a cast-in-bronze goddess set dead-center in the atrium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I’m just saying what if it was a for-true bronze goddess what was hopped up on pedestals? What if her name was Ma’khia? Or Breonna? How would your lives materially change? Is it worth the flight to find out? When I’m being hyperbolic you better-well know you’ll know it. When I cast your sorry lots into the bellies of whales and ride your pencil skyscrapers into the blood-flooded mud and side-eye your shithole cities into pillars of salt—

XXXIII.

At the birth of each new day
I wake with one wish: to flay
Myself, free of form—
of boy, of body, of bloat

XXXIV.

Once, you were—not free, not stout of wing like the eagles, but, though bound to earth, given to roam beyond the barbed-wire words this bird pelted you with. It happened while you were watching—now that’s some twisted magic trick. The coin’s never not been there, between these sticky fingers; you just didn’t see it. What a fuss, learning to listen with your eyes. HEY! My alibis are up here, m’dear! But what you ought to be watching is my sleight-of-hand job.

XXXV.

Like all true gauds my revelations please me, until I parse the implications.

Jubi Arriola-Headley (he/him) is a Black queer poet, storyteller, first-generation United Statesian and author of ORIGINAL KINK: poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020), recipient of the 2021 Housatonic Award. His second collection, Bound, will be published by Persea Books in February 2024. Jubi lives with his husband in South Florida, on ancestral Tequesta, Miccosukee, and Seminole lands.

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

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