Jarred Thompson
Telling
When I utter those words
And the air vibrates with meaning
between You and Me,
then you will hear and decipher,
and the plagues of Moses will be unleashed upon your body:
rivers of blood,
plagues of toads
locusts to feast on your brain
your first-born-self taken in the night by a silent
microscopic spirit that doesn’t know what it’s doing.
When I cut time and space with my tongue,
lashing like a whip across a slave’s back,
we’ll both feel the power of a phrase,
the renegotiation of knowledge,
the invisible tasting of what words cannot touch
only indicate.
I think of what goes down a well when no one is looking,
soft moans muffled by too much water
too much weight
too little light.
When these words reach you
after light-years of traveling
tell me you’ll see the stars between my teeth,
the galaxies spiraling, colorful in my mouth.
Though they are non-existent now,
swept away by a giant unthinking hand,
they existed and shone at a point in time.
Now their light, shimmering, refracted by city dust,
is finally reaching your ears.
Jarred Thompson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, the Esthetic Apostle, Sky Island Journal, Cosmographia Books, Best New African Poets Anthology of 2016, and New Contrast Literary Journal. His chapbook Universes and Paradoxes was shortlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Poetry Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, New Contrast Literary Journal (forthcoming 2018), The Rainy Day Literary Magazine, ImageOutWrite, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018).
SUBMIT to the HIV Here & Now project via our SUBMITTABLE site.