Betta Know (Gratitude Poem #19)

Betta Know

For Jessica Johnson

After Audre Lorde’s “jessehelms”

we are

black women

writing the future

our way

heel-toe shifting

on the nerve

of discourse

a-town stomping on the pulse

of now

we are

what the pencil skirt sharpening

typist dreamgirls

dare not daydream

we are 12 revolutions a minute

7 hail mary passes to Oya

we are winding we warmfront up

wrapping our fingers around yes

we are drum wake to every silence

gateway for ancestor swallow each

we are biting the handle

that twitterfeeds the treadmill

that runs the solar toaster

we recruit

neon conductors for a railroad in the sky

where Harriet rides shotgun winking

we bring all the names we know

and make up

new ones

we are the zero one

we are the one zero

we are the shero oneness

past binary bright

we are the blaze of phrase

we been waiting for

we are the writing

that needs no wall

only wail

we are the deep sea tracking

drowned womb trail

unmuffled by the wait of words

we are the vain enough

arteries of a truth

that will not be stopped

shopped copped chopped or screwed

except how we accept how

how we protect the neck

of the perfected wreck

how we juggle the jugular

of wanting

we are the by every means

cybernetic pocket freed fist

we are the risk we are the taken

the surly and shaken

we are the liberation lounge singers

here all weak all here regardless

we are black women

writing the future

our way

all day

betta know

this.

********

Jessica and I met each other during a simultaneously selfless and shameless redistribution of criminalized resources at a siddity and striving affair. In St. Louis. That's all I can say and keep you all safe.

Which is a coded way of saying we met on some by any means necessary do it yourself reparations, rewire an existing structure to meet our community building needs type terms. Which feels very appropriate to me. I hope our biographers include that anecdote in all its scandal because to me it sets the stage for everything else. We met in an action that showed our shared values of community over convention and realness over rules.

It is a blessing and a gift to traipse the cyberworld arms looped with a sister-comrade who I know lives the graceful mischief she speaks offline too. Jessica is a space crasher and a space creator, doing the everyday heart work of saying the unsayable and amplifying the forgotten. Prolific, profound, prophetess-historian, I am proud to share a world and steal a stage with you. I love you and everything you love via transformation, information, documentation and creation. There is nothing in the world as priceless as a down ass scholar who knows how to tweak html until it screams like Abbey Lincoln on the Freedom Now Suite. Nothing in the world.

Love you girl!!!!!

And again love to each of you for loving me like you mean it and gifting me with trip of my dreams to visit Gloria Joseph and swim in Audre Lorde's legacy. http://alexispauline.chipin.com/praise-the-lorde-st-croix-dream-trip

always,

lex