Video Vixen Speaks of Earthly Heavens
Our grief drops my jaw in its gust, and Glitter blurs, ghosting
a galaxy across my palms. Your recording booth is never far.
Spinning everything around a corps of shivering G6s
when we reverb. Watch our cup overflow, my Heels to crush.
Are you divining some shaken sentience? Bud sticky-crumbling
on repeat.
Whipped hair for your mourning train. We pull the judgment days
from the calendar. Like an unloaded clip, Rolling out is a habit of exposure
that keeps us in this new dimension. From Chillin’ to Throng, all to raise a glass flush with
invitation.
Come you and your friends, G—beside the Bentley hood, freeze hookah
Hallelujah, feather the wings of a Lamborghini wit’ our bounce
the weight of caskets Lay balanced for a moment, straight up, reuniting your body
with its Music
pores my skin. Even our spotlight is like glorying Sorrow;
we’re oiled with resonant relations, like those between planets.
We bad Bi*ches who murder quitting.
Motivation: Sugar, the set will dovetail
as messy clouds rise like a dress.
Your track accrues bodies like police light. Vixens will cherish day-long.
Had to let your ambitions grow. Pearls threaded black jiggle motion like a cakewalk ripe
with histories unspeaking themselves. With words under the tongue. As horde and host
We’re impressed by Maker, quivering down prayer as a pole.
From this, we look after you, longing for your zenith. It is at hand. Cradle the top,
offering as ambiance asses like gold frankincense myrrh.
Our Hennessey trickles into a deep; our dead homies laughing drunk on the earth.
How we hadn’t gone on without them falls dank into the past as they’re Here with
us now. Now that is a remix.
Now, scribbling records of gold. We are still celebrating how you’ve made it.
Ours is a mouthful of fallen names; piano-pedal mutes this apocalypse. These bare
shoulders sculpted out from our desire to seduce greatness Flip grief Parade ancestor
Only where our people are lifted in the air.
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“From Earth’s Royal, Dirty Mouth” or Dual Diagnosis
-Tyehimba Jess
From Earth’s royal, dirty mouth came the explicit
scar song of teens tied to revolt; came the faded tunes
of swallowed proof. Years deeper
You’re asking why you can’t
Stop. Why is it different for you?
Wrestling with primrose thorning your belly. Our prism:
Years become a jellyfish of night colors. And, daylight’s brain freeze…
A hijack, shuddered with anticipation of our
near future
It’s all for you, this writ, a ghost trap. Because we know to un-wrong ourselves, to drain the moral coloring like vodka down the sink, to instill in this universe a memory. Liquor fireworks through your writhe, as trouble, one night, you begged
me to write it down as if in rag’s time.
I’m Sorry, Grand
pa
For the flood of days like chips, for my skin’s tightness
and burning, for malnourished, punishing my-
self, and waiting
until the liquor store’s closing time
to breathe.
anterior. Hands will have tremored. We’ve turned to the war of Clenched dreams. Possessed the
verb to hope as it ruptured. Would it have quelled the maddening crowd ricocheted in your
body? My prayer wants answers that the vulgar glass is not empty; the glass is never poured.
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Reverse-Curse as Ars Poetica
After Wanda Coleman
In commemoration of those who lost their lives on D-Day.
When opened, space was simply a ruin, violently forgetting. :: When war traded secrets with
stone, traducing the memory of matter. I came to realize :: how to die without losing my tender
being. (The curse wanted the contrary for me to die hard, landing with me when I hit the
ground).
I had felt being a paratrooper, not the hollow of this curse’s hell but a language for that rich
arrhythmia dragging my breath. :: This language jettisoned syncopations, freeing me borne by
heavens as Griswold bags. ::
I threw myself open as a sky twisting :: in cursive. I even tremored belief I didn’t know I had,
atmosphered by sweat lancing through my fatigues; my face a depth camouflaged into the night
with cocoa.
I realized ::
it matters not that my body will be eaten down to a precious seed :: it matters not that the seed of
me is being abandoned on Normandy :: sprouting vines of shrapnel in the sands.
Because I am reversal :: may my mirror be seen through, and may its stain fade. Its stigmata
offered up like forgiveness in the morning :: will form my antonym to Malice to Malignancy, to
this :: M-1 Garand rifle :: that thrashes too, ::
but say these words :: four times
walking backward if you’re able for me. :: An antidote, a ghost whisper ensnaring a symbolic
order filled with bullets, my hands a parachute :: now.
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A Moment with Michelle Alexander
PDS: Tell us a little about your process while writing these poems.
MA: My process is often bound up with a response ignited by language. I found an exuberance in the language of “Video Vixen Speaks to the Earthly Heavens,” which has been a long time in the making. It leaves a trail of moments querying what Video Vixen means to me. Perhaps my fascination is bred from a desire to be a part of celebrating Black culture. So, I worked to think the fullness of what the Video Vixen could mean as bearer, attendant, witness, celebrator, and griever. How the Video Vixen's act of speaking takes off as the poem's subject is an implicit rejoinder to Audre Lorde’s “A Woman Speaks,” a mesmerizing poem. “From Earth’s Royal, Dirty Mouth,” or Dual Diagnosis,” unfolded a struggle that was and is intimately significant to me.
PDS: Who do you seek to represent or speak to in your work? In other words, what communities & people inspire you to write?
MA: I hope to engage in conversation with what poetry can do as a condition of possibility—for the imagination, the spaces of dreams, and the struggle of the living. The communities inspiring me to write are those living with mental health disorders, the community enacted through Black aesthetics and manifested at the Furious Flower conference, mixed-race communities, Black and Brown communities, and the congregation of those I have lost.
PDS: We’re absolutely floored by the opening to "Reverse-Curse as Ars Poetica" - Can you speak a little about how this poem came together & your reference to Wanda Coleman?
MA: “Reverse-Curse as Ars Poetica”—This poem is inscribed in a certain tradition of curse poems as well as in the quest after the art of poetry. The tradition includes Wanda Coleman’s “Black-Handed Curse,” which not merely deploys a twisting sky but is so exacting that my fang-like puncture form “::” emerged in response. The double colon also performs a reciprocal open call between the lines. My former professor, poet David Trinidad, led me to curse poems. Thinking from the heart of my fears and hopes about my poetry and how space in the curse of war can be violently lost to forgetting brought me to a mode and method of poetry-making that sought the reversal of curses. And the opening line came into being as a tangent glancing off Ocean Vuong’s line that thinks about color’s capacity for remembrance: an ars poetica in itself. “Reverse-Curse as Ars Poetica” signals and dedicates itself to those reversing curses with the poetry of their lives. This landed me on a beach where the poem came alive and became historicized. Bit by bit, layer by layer it began to blossom.
PDS: What are some books and writers that have influenced your writing style?
MA: Recently, I’ve found myself flush with influences: Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, CM Burroughs, Anne Carson, Phillip B. Williams, rap artist Talib Kweli, and artist Bisa Butler. The crew at Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine. “The Black Interior” essays by Elizabeth Alexander, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds” by Ocean Vuong, La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s insights into madness and Black radical creativity, and the “Black Nature” anthology edited by Camille T. Dungy.
PDS: Do you have any tips or words-to-live-by that keep you motivated as a writer in this day and age?
MA: A dare or prompt: Write from a place of love and for those whom you love inexhaustible.
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Michelle Alexander is an American-Trinidadian poet and creative nonfiction writer. She graduated from New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study and holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Her publications include work that has appeared in Salt Hill. She is a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center and the recipient of the Furious Flower 2024 Poetry Prize.
Find Michelle Alexander on Instagram @poet_michelle_noel_alexander