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Two poems by Trace DePass

Trace DePass

image: dre

attn: you who take us by force, a palindrome

i thought about what i would say
at your lightning which pierced me,
how each he has to forgive him:
for this. me running to forgive him;
you, boy defaced by other man
(to a man.)
and might, perhaps, deface, again.
i only wondered, only if you might
, unmask me, only if i may:
take some of your time
your mother gave you,
just the bits perhaps
(just a cubit now from your room,)
does it taste of what it reeks like?
to breathe a cage? not rib tonguing wings to a sun?
but locked by any man?
is what it is now to be?
abled to walk, digressing – free
, out of it,
clenching the racket
night – fluttered with you then ether then,
know, unharmed,
for certain you were.
no god but still
Here

with nothing but the beyond now

you enjoy the yank, buckle, pressure, haunting of seeing; not to say you always see, you often get caught,

faced toward the old world mosaic, discovering

you

admiring or with want to softly peer into the striking colors in the countless fractured glass.

you hope until enacting something beside it

inside it wherein the whimsy is the action not the idea of feeling or the feeling of ideas

nor the abstract, in other words…

watch: joy, chiseled as a bullet, thru the new verb retired

from the department of nouns in the grammar

frayed

before brought back to its own electrical running before becoming what, yes, might run thru it

like blood can thru flesh

in your flesh, a metaphor in its kinetic music; how a beat boxed in its black neck ungulates to bass, tone, slap; how any dance makes you a diaspora of diaspora. any bpm (bembe, calypso, dub, 60’s, 60) can double without

needing to plea dualities. just is. just as.

this case, thru (not with) your jazzed hands, you rapped so much heat, it went over the beat and microwaved aluminum caught in a too-long trough had happened to happen, and

striking cathedral decor

scorched

into being

scorched

into dimension, carved, felled, it,

bent

to an open mouth until out your now beat, boxed by heat, mouth:

returning, under the moonshine of dilla’s snare cracked viscerally smooth as vinyl returned looping this world to some post-crack-era crack, it might have been your old forgotten chipotle, it might have been this fresh, hot, new

gnostic sect after corinthians untethered from the spine as a winter of felled

bark and, like our own pillaged-bridgeless love, it was.

maybe here was broken thru jazz before jazz was, & not with it (with “with” implying under it),

“with” nothing. beyond “with”. it has nothing to do with now,

what immaterial alchemy i make-

shift to get thru it. with, if anyone, nothing but

the Beyond Now. i hope

but fractured glass and

thru, not with, the when.

what can’t, i. what was, all i ever.
 


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Trace DePass

Trace Howard DePass is the author of Self-portrait as the space between us (PANK Books 2018) and editor of Scholastic's Best Teen Writing of 2017. He served as the 2016 Teen Poet Laureate for the Borough of Queens. His work has been featured on BET Next Level, Billboard, Blavity, NPR's The Takeaway, and also resides in literary homes: Anomalous Press (fka Drunken Boat), Entropy Magazine, Split This Rock!, The Other Side of Violet, Best Teen Writing of 2015, & the East Coast Voices Anthology. As he enters 2018, Trace aims to blur the lines between the narrative arc and what is percussive. Find him on Instagram and Twitter @southsidepoems.

Author: Trace DePass Tags: poetry Category: Poetry February 2, 2018

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Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

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