Please note: Open Captioning is provided for the videos in this series in order to facilitate communication accessibility; therefore, transcripts may not be a totally verbatim record.
Disability Poetics: A Reading / Interview Series
curated by Kenny Fries
L. Lamar Wilson
PrEPositions*
Lodged in the back of my throat, held as tightly
As the slack of a man’s johnny-come-lately soul I sup
To the quick, make thicken, & dissolve into the symphony
Of my selves sieved & open, I implore you, O friend I refused to take
Inside for years. O to see your wonders performed, how trill the sound
Of my perfidious blood honeydewed! Look at us & marvel
At whose we’ve become: Big Pharma’s sugar mamas hankering
For daddies’ diamond DnAs unfiltered. I’m always dropping you
In sentences these days, with a question mark, as I whisper to you
With the same breathless assurance I want to give my every corpuscle
To the ones who choose tenderness when most herald Savage. Woke. Petty
af on the online market to the highest bidder. It took years
Before I realized I’d forgotten to let you in, forgotten to say
With with in tandem in a last will, in a love letter I’d left
To the flesh of my flesh not-yet-birthed into this nation
In which I call our clan’s father lit & beautiful.
For he is, so much so I would cuss God & dye my soul blacker
If I could. If I could, I’d sing my selves happy, kissing every crater
Of our fathers’ fathers’ father’s pale face, kiss his woman’s lips, too.
For this slave wrote us a love letter once, when she spied a glimpse
Of our bicontinental future body-bagged. Who can sing thy force? she extolled,
With palms outstretched. Imagine that! O bittersweet pill we take & feast
Upon where’er we go so that no one sees the secrets we carry
In our pockets now. Squares that we are, we’ve swallowed hope & shat fear
Of the truth we know: We are so good to gather. We do the police
In different voices, too. Our self hoods & hoodies, our woadies wildin’
Upon the dancing machinas of our woulda coulda shouldas, our shekinahs
To a glory made whole. By you. We’re so pregnant—thanks to you—
With possibilities. Let us swallow our souls’ salvation, commence
With this born-again Earth’s new covenant. PrEP, are ye the way of the Lord?
*Originally published in now-defunct online magazine HEArt.
Can you describe this poem’s relationship to your concept of Disability Poetics?
I wrote this poem in the wake of completing my first book, Sacrilegion which was invested in exploring and getting outside of my mind onto a page what it felt like growing up in a body and a mind and a spirit that was just so much bigger than all the labels put upon it, whether it was “disabled” in a way that was visible because of the paralysis of my left hand, I live with a condition called Erb’s palsy, and so I don’t use my left hand. I was breached at birth and during a forcep birth–nerve damage occurred to my brachial plexus nerve specifically, and other things, but I’ve just found out recently that during birth there was probably some cognitive damage done and so there were invisible differences in the way my mind works that could be labeled disabilities but had never been until recently when I suffered a head injury and have been going to a neuropsychologist.
So for me, when I think of Disability Poetics, and I think of what I was trying to write, both in this poem, in my larger oeuvre of discovery, which is what poetry is for me, I’m trying to write into, and through, the physical realities that I see and experience, you know, the multivalent ways in which I walk in this physical frame, with all of his gifts and limitations, but I’m also trying to get at the existential, the spiritual, the metaphysical vastness of my existence that the world may not be able to see because of how they see my racial and ethnic marker, , how they read what is for them, you know, a cisgender presentation when that is, you know, limited–that limits a two-spirit reality that I live with. I’m not transgender, I am two-spirit, but I spiritually I own and feel the feminine in a way that I don’t feel the need to present externally in the way some of my trans sisters and brothers do, but I own the feminine within me because we all start there, you know, seven weeks, we are—we have, we start with the estrogen, the testosterone and other things come, you know, later, the testes and all those other things come later, and some of us, I think, carry into our–outside of our mothers’ wombs an understanding of an intimacy with the feminine that is pathologized in the world, in a patriarchal world that clearly feels that women need to be dominated and controlled, and so to me that presents a kind of “disability” in the way that I walk through the world, because I don’t represent masculinity and the way that the world can read as the way it should be presented. I don’t see that as a disability, but I think that’s mapped onto me. I also have neurodivergences, with anxiety and depression, and other things that are that are outgrowths of being discriminated against because of my physical disability, because of the way that I walk through gender in a non-binary, you know, spiritually multiple way. My pronouns are He and We.
And so it’s always a complex question for me to answer when one asks me to, to define Disability Poetics, because I think that we think of it as something physical and now we’re starting to think about cognitive–maybe in the last several years, particularly when you’re thinking about people who are raced as Black and Brown and non-white, although whiteness is a white race like every other race that is created. You know, we are just being allowed into a conversation about mental health because in order to “integrate” into spaces that we were not welcome in, we had to sort of sublimate the things that made us not as, “acceptable” to the mainstream, although I grew up in all-Black spaces, I grew up out here in a rural space where Black people were of have been autonomous since emancipation not wanting or needing to be included into white spaces. I went to an HBCU where the predominant number of people who were there were excellent presidential scholars, valedictorians like myself, who were highly intelligent, but we did not have to think about, “What are our white classmates or teachers going to say, are they going to challenge us, are they gonna—” so I’ve always thrived in these spaces where I’m outside of, and that too, can be seen as something that is disabling in a world that wants everybody to be white and male, you know, in order to be accepted. And rich, because we have to think about class, too.
And so I—this poem specifically was an experiment. I thought “What would it look like if I wrote a poem made almost entirely of prepositional phrases?” One of the things that has haunted me my entire life is the scourge of HIV and AIDS. I learned of it as a very young boy when I lost two cousins to it when I was about six or seven years old. They were my two of my closest cousins one of whom was a bodybuilder before this happened to him and was in the world as this very hyper-masculine straight man, who privately struggled with drug addiction, and maybe his sexuality. And then his older sister died right after him, who was also someone who struggled with drug addiction. And then I had people in my community who would die in silence. I was a journalist for 20 years, and my very first story that I wrote was about a man from my hometown here in Mariana, Florida, who was living and dying in Tallahassee, Florida, where I studied at Florida A&M, with HIV. And my first story was written about World AIDS Day, which the anniversary is coming, World AIDS Day is December first every year. And so HIV has been this specter over my head was the worst thing I thought that could ever happen to me. And when it came into my intimate life with partners and in my own walk with being a person who loves people, who present, identify as male, same gender loving, and predominantly Black, I had to wrestle with that, I had to wrestle with losing not just cousins, but loved ones, partners, friends. And that’s what “Sacrilegion” and was obsessed with. The deaths of—it’s dedicated to, if you look in the back of the book, to all these friends that I lost in the early 2000s, as the arrival of all these antiretrovirals were supposed to extend life.
But a lot of people, who are dealing with these co-morbidities of mental health challenges, and not always having access to medicines and healthcare, I lost a lot of loved one in the 2000s so “Sacrilegion” was born out of that. In the wake of that, this medicine that could be preventative, to prevent HIV, emerged call PrEP and so I was looking at PrEP as an idea of what does it mean to be able to have a new world, to have these intimacies without fear of death or to be at least forestalled by this pill that’s supposed to save the day and save the world. And so PrEP came, of course, with the way my brain works, “prep” is the beginning, is the opening syllable of “prepositions.” and so I decided to write a series of prepositions that was an extension of the prayers and songs that were in “Sacreligion.” And so this was a transitional poem out of “Sacrilegion” and into the manuscript that I’m writing right now, that historicizes further back into the Reconstruction era.
What does it mean to have a free, autonomous Black space? Starting with one’s body, one’s corporeal freedom, and extending into a community that is, in the absence of–in absence of fear of white supremacy, because in this very space that I am right now, where my ancestors were once enslaved, we now own this land, and we have owned it since the 1870s. And I grew up not being taught to be afraid of, or hate, white people or resent them. I had no desire to be white, I was not told that in order to be accepted into the world, I had to assimilate into a kind of a white understanding of what the world is. I grew up as an autonomous, loved Black child who was taught to love myself just as I am, including with all the different ways that I am “disabled.” In fact, it wasn’t until I came to FSU that I even use the label “disabled,” and it was because of my friend and colleague, the Cyborg Jillian Weiss, who said, ‘We need you to share this part of yourself with the world. You’ve been writing about it, but you haven’t owned it.” I always used “differently abled,” or I always kind of gave a positive spin to the different gifts and ways that I am different. But I understand now, out of the need for community that I did not necessarily have with this aspect of my walk. to say “Yes, I too have neurodivergence. Yes, I too am disabled Brother, sister, friend: let us come together and build community.”
Disability Poetics: A Reading / Interview Series
Concept, curation, interviews and introduction by Kenny Fries
The poets (in alphabetical order)
● Kay Ulanday Barrett
● Sheila Black
● John Lee Clark
● Meg Day
● torrin a. greathouse
● Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
● Stephen Kuusisto
● Travis Chi Wing Lau
● Naomi Ortiz
● L. Lamar Wilson
Project Manager: Rachael Zubal-Ruggieri
Video Editors: Intrinsic Grey Productions
ASL Interpretation:
Keri Brooks, CDI
Fidel Torres, NIC
Linguabee, LLC
Funding for Disability Poetics is supported in part by the Canada Council for the Arts and by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach in the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University.