MAKALANI BANDELE

unit_105
shorty got all kinds of radio she don’t want. swing and a miss. i’ma just sit that right there for you to think about. trust your instincts for flight, and inclination to soar. may i have this delight? the fiery color autumn played in the white ash trees. the sentence-makers bop their heads. switch components of a loop around to get a new interpretation. you’re coming through loud and clear. does the sun have a choice? there is no light in you to enable you to light me up. trees radio she don’t want ash got. the blood remembers all the hand-to-hands, regular intrusions of stop and frisk, and search-and-seizures.
concentrate: two tablespoons make a gallon and seven more spirits seven times more wicked than the medicine in its first tincture. even though i have less than a second, i would like to take this opportunity to invite you to reconsider your estimation of the darkly bodied. the prominent sun slanted rays of bright yellow lines that warmly greeted the skin but did not thaw the air around it.
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unit_12
deep in the double sense of outlaw. that hour and arroyo where the chilly winds don’t blow, they trill. traveling cloud circus intermittently interrupts shiny needles of stars. she saw the transitions way ahead of everybody else. interpret away. that she didn’t sound the way she looked endangered her and her enterprise. oops, there goes a billion-kilowatt dam.* what was once in the bag is now in a rucksack. only farther and farther out can hold this space. gots to be more careful, in layers. gots to catch the constraint before it catches in the back of the throat. double or nothing, she went outlaw with her sound and took to living inside trees. interpret away, interpret a way out in outlaw. a caravan of ice-cold clouds in the half-dead morning. how’s it not their problem they have yet to discover the language for it? this gathering presages the ecstatic dance of the sentence-makers to free themselves.
*Frank Sinatra. Lyric to “High Hopes”. Genius, 2018, https://genius.com/Frank-sinatra-high-hopes-lyrics.
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unit_70
you can lose all this in a matter of minutes, and everybody be wondering where you went. the next sound you hear will be uncategorizably nice. there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions. lil’ daddy’s secret crushing spot. best believe. but how much uncertainty can be tolerated in the forecast? tiny, immature strawberries on a bush are a document and that document is part fiction and not the whole story. spoiler alert: sorry i’m not sorry i didn’t tell you the milk spoiled. joppapy and the sentence-makers at the hollywood bowl live and unplugged from white society, even with uneven steven’s waspy, patrician upbringing. this was urgent all along. imaginary that. went around with a couple cats slaying uncertainty, for hours wondering where everybody who was lost was. comin’ straight from the hole wildin’. there is always one in the bunch. poems are instances of particularity with sound. whatchu lookin’ at?
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unit_27,
unit qua unit
all their palaces are temporary palaces; hear imagining them. there is no absolute saffron. horizon’s pronouns are they and ours and are contingent upon the full spectrum of beaming yellows and golds around them. go there. whose shiver is this? honesty is the best policy if it is your truth to be truthful about. raw, overloaded nerves like every which way their hair goes in gusts. you can feel the sucking of the opening and closing of her heart’s valves. just be sensitive to it, suspend the ringing in your ears, you are the metaphor in this corner you backed yourself into. you being i. hit a lick. honestly, can you imagine the palatial sound in them living their best truth? don’t know what jopappy’s saying, but i know what he talkin’ bout. can’t wait until the sweetest frame. if you’ve seen nothing else from bathing in the warm sun on big rock, it’s don’t out people, get their consent first. cut.
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unit_14 as a kind of crude shank
up in the corner for your bumrush. tax the filthy rich until their teeth buzz, and they buzz somebody up. a constabular break of tree line. engaging the center from the perspective of the margins. aren’t you bored with painting facts? wish i could turn that sense of being watched off. white suburban moms got a brutal way of creating power differentials. trick better have my gate money. antique wire-rim glasses ride the tip of her nose to marrakech. the math is dubious, but it bounce around and crunk between your ears. got an inconceivable body. got a sense of bumrush in every corner of my being. inordinate timing and off the scale chromatics. cold chillin’ in an existential crisis. until morning train whistle with arrival. then again, where i’m from black men usually don’t live to see their grandchildren.
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unit_3 and three-fifths
fucked ’em up and made a black section in the middle of the white only. put the resonances in first and built around ’em. you feels the logic in these bars and reevaluate. unplug one, unplug two. playas around here shootin’ shots for shots until the patrón gone to the head. by contrast, women overall accounted for about forty-seven percent of the total labor force. how you have to clear the nose to open the head. this the music we untighten up with. the borders between gay and straight are as porous as the membranes in your nostrils. do beans burn on the grill? the masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the process of making something transformative. by contrast in this force, got some black on my total account and an overall unfuckwittable section. go gets my pistol. the grouses are oblivious and don’t even know they know they are flying. against a brilliant subtext as nuanced sun. lil’ daddy’s spatial imagination grown interplanetary on mountain fresh air and watermelon.
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unit_8,
on a unit by unit basis
from the outside out. first and foremost, never mind. her eyes like an imminent meadow. where does the vase of dead daffodils come from when you’re dreaming of (more or less) discrepant engagements? shivery at the needle exchange. closed blossoms turn in on themselves, hum thinly on a shallow level of broken cycle. give me a minute to concoct a more convincing lie. cousin the fam hardly talk about, and when that name’s mentioned, that auntie in the wheelchair always cracking nuts just shake her head. diffused moonlight. the body likes familiar touches. have you ever seen such a sign of the times? how an outside breaks out and blossoms into a bridge beyond cycle for us. today is as good as any day to refuse that which has been refused you. let’s take a moment and review the hypotenuse. the feminine present active participle of the verb to stretch below. worse comes to worst, the moral of the story is the guy gets the girl in the end to introduce him to her thick, little brother.
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MAKALANI BANDELE
makalani bandele is an Affrilachian Poet. His work has been published in several anthologies and widely in print and online journals. He is the author of under the aegis of a winged mind, awarded the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. The poems in this issue belong to an unpublished manuscript entitled vandals of knock city. Other poems from the manuscript have been published or are forthcoming in Ocean State Review, Inverted Syntax, and Posit.
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