Maafa is the only word for the African Holocaust, term for why we have a diaspora, terminal, interminable calling out of the endless lane of us. As a society we mostly don''t utter or ever learn this word or its world; we don''t ac- knowledge it at all as a phonetic event, Event Number One, gatherer of stolen and learned rhythms, silent orphan- aged hymns. Maafa, haaaaa, gotcha, awful, ma, father, ma ah fuh--its haggle and hobble of vowels, its quite- loud echo of mother and father and less and excess and access and after and before and awful and fault and falling and fuck ah fuck, the other, the fuzzy elsewhere: Maafa, its gust of captive beauty, its muted tunnel un- der itself, its sense of ruin upheld by a future, its performance of what is not but nothing but the Black future. Maafa is the always ajar door to our understanding of our own bodies as real and not, as feathers and needles, tense revocations and floating gardens on the end of suffer. Maafa is everything that haunts us because we refuse to give it a name, the crisis whose submergence becomes subterfuge, the unpaid debt that accrues as frauded energy fraught pretend transcendence, and so Maafa is our arrow/ route into the endless now and also the guardian of our impending exile from time, an exalted exile, cause for unhinged rebellion and celebration. In denying Maafa we have forced it to govern us. Maafa is a coup, a ma- ternity test on the loose. Maafa is a code ducking its own undoing, a body that can always and never be reclaimed by a know-unknown source.

And in this story Maafa is a girl, a woman, a Black divinity and epic hero who in learning her name for the first time remembers her deeds and highest most vulnerable function. She is also a killer, a slave, a fugitive a mother a sister a child a stateless hope a mistress a widow a mourner a priest. She is a girl who killed her own witnessed the massacre of her own family and forgot until now, blames herself, wonders if she did it herself even though she knows who did it. She is the heroic personification of the crisis we cannot escape without facing, and she is the matriarchy that follows our straightahead gaze into herself. Look at Maafa. Look at god. Say Her Name This is the story of a woman who has witnessed the massacre of her own family Inspection / at auction Breasts fullFace radiantEquipment ripeStance bitterHate makes her servileButtocks firm raised wideHiding style : plain sightPetit frame tribal marking on the face above right upper lip entropic indentMouth: full carefulTeeth so hip so made to break the language open to fix her name a home Likelihood of inducing owner''s empathy or love or lust : highLikelihood she has suitors of her own kind certainLikelihood they will take the whip for her or runaway when held at gunpoint : unclear middledcomfort girl or inhouse breeder unreconciled no prior attempts ravenous recoiled Likelihood the president will date her on stage unknown, Name : Ma a faMeaning Black Holocaust , astonishing surrender, ma at Beautiful walking graves chased off the water Skin perfect no blemishes or permutations in pigment Hair : coiled star in the center of a tight afro what are you even sayingkick rocks those are diamonds scar of a star Eyes unimpressed, still a little wistfulat the same damn time Nose wideSymmetryTone of voiceLikelihood she''d call jesus daddy ? and aquiline impeccable dangerous bewildered Maafa''s tongue is in the world''s mouth This is the story of a woman who has witnessed the massacre of her own family and cannot tellIf she was helpful in committing if she committed if she is always committing the crimes she is witnessing if commitment to witnessing is a commitment to crime scene she watched them and held onto the memory of their killers so hard she cannot remember if they were her or hers belonging to her commitment to see- ing them invited like company and she their hired Black witness she cannot remember what she is committed to understanding Maafa how we spun in the sunny under standinglooking for a place to keep your memories like a body or belief system someone''s crescent belly and each one we found we destroyed those women the Go forth and tell no one The three serpents whispering in my belly will have to be enough.In the first yard he shoved me in I fell over some wirey American Beauty that leads with thorns and creases to have crushed me to have shut me into the rage of escaping alive to have left me lying on my back eyes at the season plotting my alibi of daisies and praise dance when I stand up wob- ble into the yellow taxi plant a shadow where you used to be and fill it with daddies exactly like you Not that Joni Mitchell thinks she''s a Black man don''t be distracted by her yellow taxi hook slanted in blading eyes What are the wheels smilingNot that we begged to be stolen or mistake a killer for a chaperone Little bits of ride breaking with the assembly line I wanted the one who made a razor out of his shackles and carved stars into all our skulls.

I dream of that neurotic negus Van Gogh so good with his hands he cuts them off like wrong answers on a work song''s bent wing. It''s getting cool to lose our minds spend our time in danger desiring shovels for singers In Mississippi he asked me could I kill him and leave him with Ruth by the river Ever wonder who taught you that need is dirty? You be the backwoods ruby mangling the new Black fist into televisions who taught you dirty needing this built in longing for what oppresses filthy cargo there he goes ashamed of being ready we''re crazy about his tough sweet sound some kinesis Mitochondria Imma name my baby such. Fuck your lazy syllables. Might o con dreamed up a praise name. You know you ghettoif and I love it. Dictionary claims it''s the way we became human, the jaded program windows'' automatic roll up, the soda on the side type DNA lesson made fun on the block in the sun with the double dutch champion and the four wheels on wide feet hunting for fat ass that knows how to leap that rope a joyful scuffle that almost sounds like the sea having been broken but it''s just sugar and carbon stuffed in aluminium burning your teeth numb and fast twitch muscles saying high- er nigga it''s Sunday call on the numberless threads of your one mazed identity and swallow them whole bent dial Tragic Cities Her double vowel allows you to moan in pace with the everyday arrow and There she goes! hug Wilis'' huge knuckled eyes tones then call my baby, flying Sometimes I confuse Jamestown the place where slaves were docked and traded, naked and inspected, flesh flung from yes and no, with Jonestown, the cult made up a bunch of brainwashed lunatics who took their own lives in the name of desire. This world is full of magic cities.Maafa smirks to herself grotesque interiority always ready to grid and flee she fled after witnessing the massacre of her own family wasn''t sorry left the bodies to rot that they may become her fertile land Had you call me M A A F A after the rock cry out.

No longer wanna lick you off the sides of my mouth and spit you out in rhymes. Would rather murder you and do my time in dula numerals. I counted tunnels in the funny junkyard counted the minutes I could spend in open air and forced myself illiterate in American values and it was lit Neurotic with hip teeth and a Thad Jones lisp We needed to get outside. Even if we had we to run up on a liquor store promising I ain''t never coming home no more Looting / Illusion Like someone who can hear into someone else''s hearing not a spy but captive clairaudiant binge listener We all fake our deaths with her now how about that boat cult pyramid drifting off its fix into forever Maafa wants us to learn her name before she leaps she has ignored the massacre of her own familyBlames herself for their fate is that vainand then one day isn''t hums I Should Care finds spite where the terror was and prayers for Malcolm whose corpse smiles at her mutters Hallelujah In the hollow fuse of doomed adventure M a a f a got fertile as a flickering November field and egalitarian indicating rape or surrender. Middle hysterias mistaken for surrender include sleep love hunger prayer penetration shredded carrots encased in plastic like descheduled devils horns empty FEMA caskets buried deep in the shackled imagination and the playacting play cousins whose agape gazes lose track of those playingdead or replace them studiously. Don''t ask her meaning, ask her use. I think she had a body or two inside of her when the third one came alive. I know possession works both ways.

I''ve known rivals and they perished trying. I know the canoe sinking into the lake hurls debris at the psyche of each silent threat and the cloying barracudas don''t settle in no coy truce like two cars and four walls and emancipation paper ransom note: pagan, pilgrim, roll up glock in hand and switchbladed bible sandwich. I know when he called me babygirl a pressure gathered in my chest, a disgusted readiness disguised as pleasure-seeking, a tribal worm writhing from his heart to mine and no minor island remedy could be so ready as the womb Babygirl what''s a barracoon What''s between a miracle and a nightmare whiteness ? where Yeah baby right there, split it open Maafa finna go in on these wings Maafa''s Moments of Revelation Rub the mirror with such cotton it grabs your face like cave light grins This gringo family is naive they let me clean their looking glass I place an army of wooden dreams where the medicine once lasted for years in variations of pale aggression It''s fun flushing the white pills: maelstrom It''s fun touching the crushed what if diverted to see something spinning in the middle sea like like this we and coming out alive sedated by prai.