SEX DREAM IN THE KEY OF APORIA
I half-wake in sudor, queer vernacular forgotten in the sinew of sleep.
Wetted by a man whose saunter turns
my breed diaphanous,
I fasten myself to his shared anatomies while he ascribes me
to the shades of children we’d make.
Sex, my choice
harness for affection, I falter before unreining curiosity.
Trans time and space,
I follow the russet roads inside
myself, Accra lanced into my neural system still. My intra-continent sweats
through shirts, and drinks stout,
though it tastes of displacement.
I still have a penchant for what misconstrued me, to live among kin in exclusion.
Awake, I don’t conflate touch with knowledge,
so my projected selves approach
the helm as nimbus parts me. Their mission is simple.
I buck their tether
They tighten its hold.
Never have i ever
dated a Black person – my father, 2019
never knowing
the sun’s blue genus
lipped along the back
as the light of a new day
presses infinitesimal color
into the both of you
there is for me no other
way to tether love
between this vessel
and the luminous spools
I cast against my ocean’s skin
at the hull of me latent lyrics
at the helm an onyx compass
-wielding child
villageless in all their wanting
Xandria Phillips is a is a poet, educator, visual artist, and the author of the chapbook Reasons For Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Xandria’s debut poetry collection, HULL will be published this fall through Nightboat Books. They are the poetry editor at Honeysuckle Press and the curator of Love Letters to Spooks, a literary space for Black people. Their poetry is featured and forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere.
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