“I loves me some non-representation. From sculpture to jazz to poetry, I gots to have it in all the Arts. Lately, I have been experimenting with abstraction in photography, and this poem is a member of a cadre of mixed media ekphrastic experiments where the poem is in conversation with one of my non-representational photographs. Linguistically and typographically speaking, I told Maury that Douglas Kearney’s work is this poem’s baby dada poetics, even if he don’t claim his child. There is a saying in African American Vernacular English, ‘go for what you know.’ And I know many African American communities are victim to environmental racism, and I know we don’t talk enough about the intersection of Global Warming, White Supremacy, and its engine: capitalism.”
—makalani bandele