Toby Kassim

Dancing as Expressive Floating

from this high up the forms are free to move

              through without narrative. you parachute
with one hand in the air. you weathervane

             would wind pick me up if i crook my elbows wide
like this?            look how i can ghost the floor

spin my arms with propeller abandon  my ∆ t 
 is so small       my oscillators coil

            under orbit’s frequencies. Secret seconds bloom

between time’s plotted decisions. Particles misbehave

 when we look away. In the outskirts where you asked me

to dance like drones was watching      

            where the day dropped
a shadow longer than the sun’s distance           our fission was vibrant
            and detached from that

high up            the swirl of moving’s intentions from far away            we ribbon

            in displacement’s crosscut windgusts
            frilling              between freeze frames

                         in thinking’s image       lacing the treeline we can touch

            one hand on the ground and spring back like a peach
            was pulling our branches          to earth

touch ground like a pen           or  a battery     without burial

                                    our faces  glow up        
                                    in  circuit when we separate

             
when we separate we  static    

 light from our hands

Never Expect Power Always

Fear of god’s not hard when the lights could fail
without warning. We said they took light
when the city went quiet. Fished matches
blind from the drawers. Time slowed to the drip
of candlewax. A puddle to straighten the bases

of white spears tipped with flame. Held up
the ceiling. Intermittent enlightenment
above us, the law’s black scroll unraveled
god over the post colony. For a peek into power’s
pages I tried to pin blackouts to expectations:

the first crack of thunder, the sufficiency
of the stars. Or the threshold of the house
was a wire my father tripped across.

Home in obscure causes I connect nothing
like the power lines and spark on occasion.

I believe in the lizards on the wires, their eyes
white like the snow of old tv sets. Disfigured
unison of a hundred generators that start
and rattle out of turn. Flash-
lights sway. Kerosene lanterns sweat. Migrant
wings overhead dapple the dusk. The city
like a colony of fireflies. We wove
our place in the fray in the dark–
confirmed our belonging in the dark

flickers in neighbor windows. My brothers
and I danced up NEPA in circles for the haphazard
return to seeing. Organized light burned out
those patterns. Lights out for a night at most; lights
out for the unpaid bill. How should I celebrate
the return of what wasn’t always run out? The rush
of power sits tinnient in my ear. In constant light
I feel what gathers just beyond. Perfect dark
enters when we pray with our eyes
closed for that sound in the bones
of the house when the fridge buzzes to life again.

The Alien/nation/body in search of wings

I bellied the high wire a faint buzzing
strung between my legs. Like a signal. I sidled
along the powerline on my belly, relayed
and swooping low at points, swinging
I slid across the sky gripping tightly the power
line, my home among the smog I thought, song
my home among birds. The crows slung my new
name low over the porches, cooing
Hold me up,  the voice settled an invisible
net strung between the powerlines.
I peered down from the wire, while falling
hung slightly off the ground–
the hum of entanglement my steps just
hovered over. the buzz of containment
barely escaped. I was strung between the poles
stretching to be everywhere. Let me belong
to everybody now, mid-teeter, I can make
this string vibrate, I can see the warp of that
sound no one really hears anymore.

Split Peach

This sphere still won't contain all

the sweetness teeming in it. A blister

 of nectar in furred flesh's

anticipation. A bead seeped

from a hard cleft like scent

            out of season. The rasp

of our early emergence after dreams

turn fallow soil in the throat.

Hoarse intimations

of vision to celebrate!

Will today seed it? I'll never be ready

so I’m up early planting trees

on the lookout for your survival.

Our mother’s song rouses

the birds earlier for your return. You wind-

carried, you blown-through song I would

propagate. I'm naming all the burned

trails after the imperceived of how you 

draw near. The lushness of our plan

to overgrow you is spreading, touching

leaf to leaf until the whole family is loud

on your arrival. Until sound disperses

your destination, I’ll be the trace

of your foliation's spiral, following

you out my voice has already returned.

Equatorial Antigone

My sister wants to know why I haven't been going to church

She wants to sprinkle the blood of the covenant over my body from far away

I mean: she prays for me in my crisis of faith

I mean: there are long-distance reasons for rain

She shows me the chickens and tubers in our aunty’s garden

She is persona non grata at the embassy

In exchange: my extended outlaw in paradise

I send her my tomatoes in late summer, unripe on the vine

If I die she won't receive a visa to see to my last rites

Is there no change of death in America

Maybe there is a longer life after this one

The law gathers weights to tip its scales

Rain reconciles the gaps

Waters swell in the trench between distance and difference

Wash me in blood that’s thicker than salvation

I make a living will

No flag could undo my expulsion from the city

My soul will not rest fastened to these borders

No Greek will be able to discriminate my body

Only my sister can bury me now

Triplex

In a different climate my father worked in glass, loved windows
and transparent surfaces for bowls to float on. Wholesale


Prices on catching reflections everywhere in the house.
Once, my body went reckless through a glass table’s glass


leg. I knew I would pay when dad got back. I always passed
out hoping I could wake up after punishment somehow.


They replaced the leg but it was different
Frosted, so I perceived the value of clarity


it was important to see the courtyard through three
tall windows around the table so the room

curved like a throat’s openness to rain—
the round sound of thunder from inside and outside

at once. So I could phase between cover and exposure
through the walls, but there were layers, and edges still broke.


in those spaces. Courtesy of a British company slinging triple
layer safety glass for windscreens from an outpost in Ibadan,

His leg broke in three places in the passenger
seat of the company car. His bones are fused to metal still.

Body is a house with foreign elements so I know
it’s important to be clear. To swallow a pane

of glass darkly that suggests continuity in the jagged.
A seamless line of sight from room to room

to outside me. I always put outstretched arms through
the obvious only to find out how cleanly glass enters.

A mirror slid off loose pegs and took a sliver of my wrist
I didn’t even bleed, just seeped clear fluid

From fatty white ridges under the superfice.
Every time they closed something new inside of me. I walked

straight through glass into the memory house
on a phone screen. The scale stitched home’s smallness

inside me. I couldn’t support the weight. A fracture
crept across what? Body I would have braced against the slow

ingress of edge damage. Spontaneous breakage. If I saw the rain
seep in the frame of a window,  through the pores in the ceiling–

The courtyard is overgrown. Green and yellow
fronds swallowed all the windows and took over the walls.