Terrell Jamal Terry

A Plethora of Future Artifacts

Frost hard, 1988: a vibrant world
sharp & again familiar.

We are there with growing legs
feeling huh
for modern nostalgia.

The old bulbs warm
before they really burn

in a small apartment housing six.

I still believe in connected turns,
creation
& getting away with thinking.

I try not to make words on hold
become a poem about a poem.

My ear sticks, sleeps
in the now

as I eat dinner
with the mapmaker’s ghost
who hides
her smile to touch the spill.

I have the urge to race the past
to a perfect city

or some other recent obsession.

I’ll say no more
as it would imply there was
a danger once.

---

Interstitial Hush

The is not a word, but a bridge
to darker fruit enmeshed
in fields of whatever wreckage
I have likely been.

Sink it—deep-washed by sustained
dream-history, dared
& shared again.
I don’t know what I’m saying.
I’ll ask if you heal & haunt.
Don’t guess.

What you have made space for
has left scented fingerprints
on a cloud braised brightly across
such a deceptively long time.
Of all slow things working
there’s more than one stalling plot--
powers within circumstance,
resources of private resolution.

It’s only surface off mirrors
mustering my reflection,
& I’m itching to finally eat smoke
drifting from the archives.