MADISON MCCARTHA

Statement:

I'm not interested in traditional performances of black identity, nor am I thinking about an identity or politics tied to a specific nation, or people, besides the African diaspora at large. This is a poetry that foregrounds disjuncture, multiplicity, and rupture: a porous poetry; an occult poetry. This serialized persona poem, FREAKOPHONE WORLD, enacts a self-mythologization, tinged with the occult, but also with Afrofuturism, and a kind of fungal eco-poetics. This is an unruly, resistant poetry whose infectious speaker utters itself as a fictional, yet recognizable other, and whose textual body is itself a diaspora.

from FREAKOPHONE WORLD

 

*

hostboy says 

i am the red-wet-ghostly
nose-hair strung

w/ a needle between the ears

this passage between us      stop

put your finger here      stop

feel that?

flash-burn i bend

my voice through       make contact

night’s first pink pinch

an umbilicus takes shape in

a braid-worse
                             a brayed verse

a word-one-single-word^[1]

i speak inside never
taking a hint or getting a job

sleepy little picaninny

in dark-matter
in mule-matter

in you who matter most

ash-body-floating-belly-up-in-the-same-ooze-this-hypoglossal-tongue-steeps-inside

forget it

i just need to eat something

let’s start with your departed loves
your deported loves

whatever happens

doesn’t happen

in a vacuum    still-wet well

you run your tongue along

let me show you

everything i do
i do for the mule

lit-match-we-flick-inside

eyes on me

this clump of hair phosphorescing

in mourn-mud
spazzing-leaf-work

wave so i can see you

*

i have stood upon a tiny speck of earth

skull of my little corpse
descending slow as a fever

as chalk outlining a body

we huddle into     where we shit     where we gather on an unmarked log     unmarked buick
some birch     unmarked crushed can of vomit-cola     unmarked dried cola blood whose glucose
tastes so good we fungal-bang &     fungal-bang again     in an unmarked diseased pheasant
in his unmarked pheasant flock     in your brain     we excrete the hormone that says
everything is normal

say it                    

everything-is-normal-squawk-squawk
we obliterate

so you don’t have to

pustule-who-spreads-our-spores

good-for-nothing cry
in the sewer-air barely

illuminating the spazz-war-
to-end-all-wars

rat bodies swarming under

this lunar leak
glaucoma eye

above your bed

chuh

             chuh

like you care

like you have a thought     like you have an organ     like there’s a chimney in your throat
peeky-peeking out of your mouth     telling me how you feel when how you feel is pitch-black-
spunk spraying in the open-air      (thank-you     was that for free)

open wide

& take a breath
now take another

shit

we almost lost you

don’t do that again

---

 

Madison McCartha is a black poet, editor, and designer. His ectospecks have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Journal, Jubilat, Yalobusha Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. He has served as Design Editor for Cream City Review, and became the Poetry Editor for Storm Cellar. Madison holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame.