Two New Poems | Gabrielle Octavia Rucker
December 8, 2023
image: Felicia Rucker
BC YOU ASKED ME WHAT I SPEND MY TIME DOING W/O A CHILD
I read books about peculiar women contemplating their solitude.
I admire their vocabulary, the author’s deft turning of a phrase.
I study Guyanese cooking blogs, soak tamarind to add to my chana.
I forage rosemary & shisho, gnaw on weakened saccharum cut straight from its stalk.
I carry wooden coins to the marketplace, walk home with cheesecake, a dirty carton of eggs.
I sit on the porch sucking fleshy satsuma, spit the seeds in the street, toss the peel.
I wait on shipments of beeswax, black seed oil, candles fixed in Detroit.
I skin rabbits in the yard, boil down the brains, clean the skull, let it steep.
I go on hikes to ponder waterfalls, swim topless in pools of reddened clay.
I take photos in my fuchsia bikini, lace up my peach-pink colored boots & climb a hill.
I pull a card or two, cut my hair, shoo lizards off the screen door.
I throw chicken wings and fish heads down to the cats beneath the house.
I buy french fries & braiding hair, mop-heads & vinegar, vintage silver rings.
I lay on my back watching clouds, cross my legs as the wind lifts my dress.
I wait for the blood to start, to come running down, staining my legs red, wet in between.
LAG/TIME (ZOOTED)
I read across an erasure a dream
that is not a dream or hallucinated
but collected from elsewhere
– Edgar Garcia, “Boundary Loot,” 2012
Three hits in & you remember you’re dead & that dead people
live just as you do:
hunting for water, toiling about the oven,
halted before architectures tuned in abstract –
misshapen doors that disallow breeze,
discouraging spirits from passing through
so they hover, casting a thin black mold
across the ceiling.
Dreamless sleep stagnates intuition.
A toxic barrier mounts behind the right eye beating the sinus dry.
The ghost inhabiting your mind pushes her face
against the retina’s window, turning your attention down
toward the fine text of the floorboards woodgrain, the oldest earth in the house,
where she commands you to sit & remember every frightful battle you endured –
the start of Time – the end of Time –
the salted womb in which your consciousness cured –
You wake dehydrated to the sound of disembodied fireworks,
shimmy on a slip to go eat cold rice over the sink.
A void descends.
The bland taste of tap water, filtered.
The bloodless curdle of goat’s milk, warmed.
Somewhere in the walls a cockroach hides,
stroking clean her antennae, moving
by the command of a voice you cannot hear –
a sense, a smell, a straight line knowledge guarded
under the thin lining of her atomic shell.
The mind lags, catching a loop of time:
A plot of oozing swampland.
The inevitable rubble of your house.
You ponder your hand and a tree sprouts.
An innumerable chorus mounts the vision with song.
A bell chimes,
To be alive is to be a deviation of Wisdom.
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a self-taught writer and poetic practicioner from the Great Lakes currently living in the Gulf Coast. She is a 2020 Poetry Project Fellow and 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work has appeared in various media and publications, including the Sundance Film Festival, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Annulet, Montez Press Radio, and more. Her debut poetry collection, Dereliction, was published by The Sound Cave in 2022. gogogo.info
