to birth laws of relational dark

Close your eyes / in a dark room / and choose / which dark to fear.

Illustrated by kaya joan
Close your eyes in a dark room and choose which dark to fear. Raise your left hand and leave it there until the rings on your fingers glow in your mind. Let this light be the room’s death.
Say your name thrice into the black. Let what you perceive become your new name. There are ships going to and from across the blank. Locate your self on each. Your dark is a harbor—
you get to sail off and come back, unconditionally. But know, both pirates and police hunt the coast. For now, attend to the center of your island. Your selves are tied together, in knots,
writhing in the heart of your homeland. They blaze with friction but there is no pain. While you watch, another you crawls from the shore to your island’s center. They ask to join the you that is the we. One
of you peels off to welcome the newest you into the folds of your fold. None of you speak the same language as the rest. You allow each other admittance by their resemblance
to your mother. Any other face is fed to the waves that brought you. From this point on, every interaction, every decision, is carried by every you that has survived the journey from the water.
Call your selves the names of people you have forgotten, so call your selves nothing. Nothing teems the lip of what you don’t see. Trust the dark that bothered to name you first.

Leslie McIntosh

Leslie McIntosh (all pronouns respectfully used) has been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between vocal stereotypy,  perseveration, cognitive flexibility, and negative capability. With writing supported by grants and fellowships from the Breadloaf Writers Conference, Jersey City Arts Council, Millay Arts, The Watering Hole, and Zoeglossia, Leslie's work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, some of which include Beloit Poetry Journal, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, Obsidian, Ploughshares, Witness, and elsewhere. Currently a chapbook editor at Newfound: An Inquiry of Place, Leslie lives on the stolen land of the Munsee Lenape, presently known as Jersey City, NJ, USA.

Kaya Joan

Kaya Joan is a multi-disciplinary Afro-Indigenous (Vincentian, Kanien’kehá:ka, Jamaican, settler) artist born and raised in T’karonto, Dish with One Spoon treaty territory, based in what is currently known as Prince Edward County, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, and Wendat territory. Kaya’s practice explores Black and Indigenous futurity, archival practices, mapping, storytelling, and relationship to place.

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