The Black Outside

Dear Beloved, Come on out into the Outside: — 
where the nightshade trumpets cry slow sap  
& celebrate. Come on Beloved. Come on out  
into this milieu of militant affection. Gather in the clearing,  
the shaded bush room, around this tree named Brother  
where the funk is sweet, warm, damp place that gives 
life. Come on. Starry-eyed swamp sugar, smelling like  
outside, sitting on your granny’s good couch, Lovemud.  
Out into this other world, where the whole body becomes  
a drum. Out here: —this ecological condition of Blackness.  
Come out of that long longed for opening, lubricated  
with spit. Dear Beloved, it’s a conspiracy of spirit: — 
it can’t be done alone. Come find me on the one 
& make it one more. Take your time but come on.  
Out into the absurd emerald universe where their eye  
can’t reach. Outside sense, where their mind can’t eat.  
We are tearing the calluses of bark from our wounds. 
We are here in the grooves of bark, dancing up musk.  
We are listening to the dehiscence  
of honeysuckle seed 
           — : break open. When the bass crawls  
up your roots and out into the night air 
our syncopated heartbeats boom together.  
I need I neeeeeeeeeeeeed: — Listen: — 
You look good Beloved. 
Feel so good. You feel like sliding  
out into dusk when it first begins.  
You feel like a heat wave, shimmering  
on skin. Uh. This fume of sorrowful smoke 
leaves me when you come closer: — 
                                                                       Goddamn Beloved, You’re so  
                                                                        soft dark night. You know  
                                                                        you’re out of sight: —

Copyright © 2024 by Joy Priest. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 26, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This poem is from the title series of my manuscript in progress. Inspired by Clyde Woods’s Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, this series treats classic Black music traditions—the spirituals, the blues, jazz, soul, and funk—as speculative knowledges, alternatives to Western metaphysics, that archive and produce a vision of other possible worlds, out there. ‘The Black Outside’ imagines alongside Saidiya Hartman who said, ‘The enclosure is so brutal.’ It imagines us outside of the carceral ‘New World.’”
—Joy Priest