August 1, 2022
Audio
aphasia quasi una sonata
after Harryette Mullen and Fred Moten
By heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
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aphasia quasi una sonata
after Harryette Mullen and Fred Moten
Skeletons in the castle, nothing like a wardrobe. I come out, again,
memory folded in with the linens, envisions.
My love comes bursting out the doors.
Did we begin to believe there was prestige, being a factory member in the university?
In this cog expectation, we tenure malfunction
My love libraries wonder, a declassificatory spill.
I undress to my skivvies in the cynic, vital signs hiding the story in my pulse.
They take my trumpeter, decipher fever into teaser.
My love jumbles all the letters in the dictator’s ‘script.
O empire, you carceral laboratory and hell. In the b-b-brown in the b-brain
in the break. I tire of rectitude’s law and constraint. Fog and fatigue by subjunction.
My love rests low in the parallax, the periscope, periphery.
Kissing her slip, the whole world is a portrait of a ladder on fire
I tree her yeses, and always will spit out the patriarchy burning my m-m-m
mou—
burning my mou—
(there is no word for what you do to me. Why should it appear now?)
thou thou, though, know it anyway:
My love is as jungle as cake
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (she/her) is a queer, sick/disabled, Colombian/Latinx, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) won the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She is a VONA alum and has received poetry fellowships from Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Radar, VONA, and Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Her poetry has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock’s Quarry, Nat.Brut, and Foglifter, among other places. She currently lives in southern California and is Visiting Assistant Professor in Politics and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College in the 2022-23 academic year.
Image Description: heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, a brown queer with long dark hair wearing a black and white striped shirt, nose rings, and gold hoop earrings, is pictured in profile facing and inhaling the scent of a blooming lilac bush with her eyes closed. Flowers, green leaves, and grass abound.