Julian Randall
Codeswitch Decomposing into Lil Wayne Lyric
After Danez Smith
Lord Please Forgive Me for My Brash Delivery
A face is for other people’s benefit, a brochure gospel
undone by a mouth. I am the most marketable sin since 2004.
A smile that yields only bones, a mouth slick with restraint.
I am a good filament, a bright obedient electric. I speak,
and sometimes am found.
Lord Please Forgive Me for My Brash
body and especially my mouth, for-
give me my scholarships, for-
give me my name brand ambition, for-
give me my tattered skin on my G-Unit sneakers
how easy I drenched all the photographs
Lord Please Forgive Me
my jagged epiphanies
my tarnished
jaw gleaming w/excess & all
my un-flayed dark
Lord Please
y’all knew I was a storm when you Found me
once a white boy asked me for a Skin-Colored Marker
I say Whose skin? and stare until he buss out cryin’
Imma flood waiting to happen been like this since ‘99
Lord
You know
I’mma make it rain
I’m da hurricane son
**
Like Everything Else, Love Begins in Hennessy
I am sure now that love
is built like most countries
where one thing names another
in a fit of want history ensues
And this is as good a place to begin
as any I knew I loved her
when it was most clear how little
I loved me how little anything did
A harvest of gone names plaguing me
with dreams where there was no body
to offer and February was a kind of roar
an abyss that wore my face and so
I drank a lot so much so
that the first time I touched her face
my fingers forgot the labor of hands
I am spilling everywhere I don’t
remember how to be anything
but the brass burn and the ripple
of a drained body and still
and still and still she chose me
and vice versa
It is not so much that she saved my life
as that we remembered together
that we were alive at all
was there fracture? Yes
but nothing with a name can claim otherwise
A year has passed I lay the phone
on my chest let the vibration of her voice
chisel a small home where I prayed nothing
might ever trouble the flesh again
Love like everything else begins in Hennessy
the mouth blooming out of a temporary numb
the body the body the body
despite
**
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Biracial Boy Reps His Blood
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**
Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. He is a 2016 Callaloo fellow, 2017 BOAAT fellow and the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. His poem “Police Dream #607” was selected by Joel Dias-Porter as the winner of the 2016 Emerge Literary Journal Contest. He is also a cofounder of the Afrolatinx poetry collective Piel Cafe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Nepantla, Rattle Poets Respond, Winter Tangerine Review, Vinyl, Puerto del Sol, and African Voices among others. He is a candidate for his MFA in Poetry at Ole Miss.
