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Curious and Counting

Arisa White

How do I get in your atmosphere?
Tell me about your signs, look me planetarily
—those Venuses in your eyes?

There was no thought after you
and I wrote it down. Wandered
to the wailing with my back exposed.

My kind of Sunday, your knees
buffalo and kicking up plains.
We go sockless for beauty.

Ribbons unwind bring us to tied,
I’m at your symmetry, remembering
all your digits and your lucky number nine.

Arisa White is the author of Who’s Your Daddy (Augury Books, 2021). A Cave Canem fellow, White serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press, and is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College.

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About this Poem

“I came across this poem in a journal from October 2016. I was amused with its music and strange imagery—so intimate and precise and resonant with historical and religious referents. The poem invites you to be curious and to enjoy the sensations and wonder that it evokes.”
—Arisa White

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warm water

The narrative that I do not belong in the spindle of my spine,
in a biorhythm part NaeNae and Wop, as a translation generations
removed from meaning—these are my crying thirties.

Arisa White

Will know nothing

Deep inside the quiet deep parting of private seas
to leagues of muscular chants, there is a love
to be lost and broken rearranged like blocks—
whose name we spell is not the issue—it is us not willing
to pay attention to architecture, its integrity, whether
it will last the shake we go story after story

Arisa White

gun(n)

^{for Sakia Gunn}

Sakia, if you had the weapon of your last name,
I would not know you. This steady scrape
against paper to transport fecund lament, never.
If in your hands the pearl-handled gun

Arisa White

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Curious and Counting