Jennifer Tamayo
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Dear HT,
I don’t want to cohere
but will anyone be my friend?
JT
Dear Harriet Tubman,
I want to use your body for my own pleasure. In other words, to be historical. In other words, I want to warp your flesh around my subject. In other words, art needs bodies & I believe in ritual. In other words, through history, I am such a slurk. In other words, I sniff your garments & cover myself in the glazed sheath of your human skin. In other words, I want the guhlt.
Bodies are objects Harriet Tubman and, as such, have more power, in others words.
Dear Harriet Tubman,
How is it to be buried under the singular displeasure of the sentence?
Your life story is depicted in a series of silhouette panels. In one, an infant’s body. In another, trees surround the figure of the woman shape. Then the marriage. Then the journey. Then the house. Then the death bed. Then these letters. Harriet, I want to eat the pink stained tyranny of a sentence-- get a little bit emo. I get emotional near the garbage by the placard. I get emotional next the Lay’s Potato Chips bag. I get emotional around the empty Heineken bottles likes doves in the bushes. I get emotional in the sweater I’m wearing. I get emotional on my way into the Dunkin Donuts. I get emotional on my donut.
When I look at you I say I am not a white man.
It has to be said, Harriet, that I’m 28 and stuck in the vortex of being 28
in the age of the internet and liminal spaces. One of my poem’s fingers creeps in to my asshole.
There is a pleasure to the body torn to pieces.
Harryette Mullen,
Language is a type-o-trash & I’m uncertain about the concept of non-violence
as in, these letters are all arms
When I pass by your memorial on my way to Dunkin Donuts, I get the word sickies. Did you hear me, Harriet, all my lovers have white names? The tail end of the statue is a tangle of roots dragging you down to the earth. On the internet there’s a discussion about whether you are facing in the right direction: glazing south to where you came from or facing north to where you are going. The artist said you are supposed to be an object here. “She is not represented as herself, Harriet Tubman,” it reads.
I have to say this: Am I a using you.
I’ll hug until we crush each other.
Dear Mrs. Tubman,
There will come a day when body is an abolition
You will get me through this. Something I suppose you know well. Yours was another type of art: orienteering.
I have tried to make my way by the moon but I always end up on the internet.
I can’t be sure who I am because she has no way of speaking.
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Jennifer Tamayo is a writer and performer. Her collection of poems and art work, Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes was selected by Cathy Park Hong as the 2010 winner of the Gatewood Prize and published by Switchback books in 2011. Her poems, videos, and criticism have most recently appeared in tender-loin, Smoking Glue Gun, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jacket 2, and Delirious Hem, among others. JT serves as the Managing Editor at Futurepoem. She lives in Harlem.