Ode to Badu
She wears geometry
on her chest and
philosophy around
her waist—a mathematical
priestess. She makes maxims
with her throat & moves
like fire licking wood &
vibrates like the hairs
of a kora or the petals
of a balafon. She’s all
antebellum & rimshots
& Wu Tang. She’s all
street tongue & electric braids
& Bhambatha—his eye down
the apartheid barrel.
I Give the Jeweler My Heart
for J
I give the jeweler my heart
to make a new piece
that fumes from my chest
like dry ice.
I want the dealer to sell me
on his corner
instead of the schwag
in his coat pocket.
I ask my pimp
for my mileage, my cut,
my bottle, and the next client—
who waits in the folds of empty paper.
I beg the DJ
to turn up my jungle music
so the bass bounces
off my swollen temples.
I don’t understand Yeats
or Wordsworth;
I’m all Biggie
and Pac.
I told the professor
I didn’t know
where I learned to write,
but I lied:
I listened to Nas
paint his hood
in the pastels
of spinning vinyl.
Sweetness
That sweet drunkenness
when you forget
to forget
the ghost of walking:
the Brooklyn night,
the narrow sidewalk—
cracked by an old root,
those Black faces
like leaves that hang on
till late November,
my chair like an ox—
beaten by everything,
pressed by the weight
of a sweet spastic.
I think tonight
I’ll watch The Boondocks
& read “The Dead”
in the thick molasses
of my empty room.
I will kiss my teeth
& pour myself another
paragraph, my fingers dripping
with metaphor.
Latif Askia Ba is a poet living with Choreic Cerebral Palsy from Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. Askia Ba is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University and an author at Stillhouse Press who will be publishing his next collection, “The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon,” in fall of 2022. Askia Ba’s debut collection, “Wet Monasteries,” was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2019.
Featured image: @jay.jay19971
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