The Language of Kernels, A Hard Nut to Crack

I let Ma know over a voice call, in one of our many lessons on the mother tongue,
that something keeps wanting to snatch her from my jaw.
the effort of which, recycles itself in the many generations of Blacks here.

the dead of Nat Turner ransacking the mouth hole of Henry Box Brown—
whose gloved hands reaches for me. a suffering named in the contemporary:
linguistic Mamacide. Creole, scraped out from both sides of my maw.

all trauma begins by killing the wet parlance of a black body,
wetting the killed body of a black parlance.
it begins with the migrant choosing to dance in the wet of rain over,
rehearsing a white lie for his audience.

you chasing after snow, how many sounds have you rehearsed today?
my mother repeats this question for the umpteenth time,
ignorant of what the word “race” can mean when it’s not referring to a tribe.

I respond with my recent body count instead, in a bid to distract.
yet, she sets aside the vernacular of my body to talk about
the more pressing need of dialect. ignorant again, of where to draw
the line between the physical flesh & the killed body of black parlance.

between a language for the bedroom & the one to be rehearsed with a white accent.
between what accent has gifted her son, & taken back in return.
& I, overwhelmed by these juxtapositions, my migrant body craving for a dance,
voice-mailed a friend to inquire if it’s raining on her own side of town.

she calls back, wet with a pressing need like a language I want to learn.
how many missed calls have you rehearsed today?
she asked, knowing my paranoia with words,
aware of how I can remain stuck in the door of my body

with several plea raining inside of my mouth:
all the calm it takes to kill a mother tongue.
do I wet on myself when placed side-by-side with a foreign language.
does the piss unmake me, make me human?

these questions remain all washed up in my head like after-rain smell.
& say I don’t bring it to pass, it won’t manifest in reality on the body—
comfortable with that migrant stink, musty as petrichor.
the question has something to do with Urinal bowls & a swelled bladder,

something about a writer submitting his plans to move countries,
& his family urinates on the jaw that blurts out the idea.
the story ends in piss, clear as white noise coming from an airplane.
joy sucks up all my voice from the journey.

the water dressed in the urinal bowl too, a kind of trip.
this arrived town, where one uses a restroom & people inspect the emiction for black stain.
a gardener once told me to swear that I do not shave outside of the artwork that is my
house, & I stood like an upside down letter V to micturate on the spot.

anyone would wish the foul-smelling substance damages the grass.
if nothing else, a hedgehog will see the barrenness in it
& make an O with the spade of its mouth: this too, a kind of urinal.

a hole is a well dug afterthought, easy to curl into,
& stay snatching the language of kernels from your mouth.

rain falls & it feels like the pouring of sand: a hole covering.
the burying alive of a self that lays down—drenched in sound.