“If [we are] to have not only a future but a destiny, it must be consciously and deliberately designed.”
—June Jordan, “Skyrise for Harlem”


                              cut of memory and sky,
                conjured by a half-million breathing earths between two rivers,
the girls’ heads rise
                cut of precise lip and pigtail,
                              angled toward imagination, the godhead girls rise
                like wisps of smoke
like plumes of gravity
                the ancestor girlheads rise
                                between us              
                                                                  —into this open we protect for Harlem’s dreaming  

us—orange and purple
                                fly and whorl                                                 are storytellers

how can a person a community a place a dream  
                                                                                  be told?         how does a person decide to tell, to dream
                                                                     this from that?         that or this?
‍
we hold aloft a memory pasted in fog and newsprint         our feet glancing dancing sliding & grooving
     over June’s leveled dust         we’ve conjured a cloud of haunt so the haunt cannot cloud         we’ve made
     a suspended water of visible history          no lying no denying          give grief a place to drift a gaze        
real enough to produce a rain to mulch a terrace to feed a plant to pattern a palm         we hold up this
                 thickbellied, papered-over violence          bear its weight to honor the memory-holders

our galaxy-eyed,
                femme-dusk storytelling:
made of caterpillars, leaves, known and unknown aspects of the universe, of
touch, of the gravity of being seen, of hunger/tender, of vines tendriling the
light, of children’s hands at play, of land unkempt left to be wild again, to
flourish and fruit on its own accord, like one’s own body, no more
architecturally gridded violences, cadence and hum of unobstructed
living—sound: picked cherries and a trumpet breathing into a velvet evening,  
dishes and dinner laughter scraping tables, of love being made, a storytelling
made up memory, of the now, of flesh, kept and released like the sharp angling
of silver fish, their collective, mercurial dart, like boys in a breaking July heat
wave            pouring out of summer school            gathering in a cloud around
                 James Powell
                 James Powell

                                  Jimmy Powell
‍
we, fly and whorl, protect a sky
improvisational enough                                                                          & beneath this certain kind of history for

all      

       of Harlem’s children to fly home,

wash their still-small feet
with jasmine oil
salt
flowers, roots, smoke
& song

Now:
notice the blankness between us
the space June carved for dreaming
that we hold together
in which
infinite, yet-to-be futures
yet to be envisioned, yet to be made
beckon, behold, invite
notice our bodies                                                                     pretty titties, toes done                         eye a galaxy, mind a whorl—                

notice how the light
source that glosses our bodies
is you, Harlem, the promise of your imagination,

                                                                                lifting on your sound

                                                                                             three Black girls pigtailed
                                                                                                             stubborn and free as water as light
                                                                                             up float their ancestor heads
                                                                                arising from you, then and now,    
you, the proof—


June said: “We did not know that we would win. / We knew that we were right.”—

that walking into the sky is possible