1 poem
Praisesong
Prayer before Drowning the Empty Hours
To throw it all downwind
Into the work sewers
To be that thing, to push through
Dark gravel and fetid waste
To sweep and burrow hastening
The bent shape of water
Into the hardening turn
To hum head down
To hum flank and haunch
Hum blister hum bleed
Hum mud dead meat
Become dull delirium drone
Bold blood turnip, blood whetstone
Drum through fever, hunger, cramp, and chill
Drum through rough wrack and flood
Scrub the sturdy stain of sleep
Clutch the trenchant plank, drudge
Then grunt, lucky bridge, sweat kerosene
Drill and dredge the silt bed, suppress
And suck, gulp the bruised jelly head
The bone bread scruff, the spade
Swallowing claw and growl
Burnt oil scant knot clusters
Blank gunk cabinet, blank gunk gauge
Compass whistle and want rut, dig
And gruntwantwantwantwantwant
gruntwantwantwantwantwant
gruntwantwantwantwantwant
gruntwantwantwantwantwant
Grunt mud lever, mud pulley rung
Grunt glutfat meat, grease piston track and gear
Grunt clay dirt shunt, mudshunt belt
Buckshot cud grinding, shove and grunt
Heavy mud pocket, mudpad heart thudding
Grunt locked they-head stopped with rope
Sputter mouth, teeth glint, gruntmud gums
Grunt coarse gristle, grunt sludge tongue
Coarse-ground slosh, wretched naught song
Grunt and hum along
Duriel E. Harris is a writer, performer, artist, and scholar. She is author of three critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including No Dictionary of a Living Tongue (Nightboat, 2017), Drag (2003), and Amnesiac: Poems (2010). Multi-genre works include the one-woman theatrical performance Thingification, the video collaboration Speleology (2011), and the sound+image project “Blood Labyrinth.” Recent appearances include performances at the Black Midwest Initiative, Lake Forest College Allan L. Carr Theatre, Naropa, the Chicago Jazz Festival (with Douglas Ewart & Inventions), Poet’s House, the Greenhouse Theater, The Votive Poetics Workshop (New Zealand), the Art Institute of Chicago, and Festival Internacional de Poesía de La Habana (Cuba). Cofounder of The Black Took Collective, Harris has been a MacDowell and Millay Colony fellow and has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Her work has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, The Poetry Foundation, BAX, PEN America, &Now Awards, Of Poetry & Protest, Troubling the Line, Poets.org, and Letters to the Future; and her compositions have been translated into Polish, German, and Spanish. Harris is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Illinois State University and Editor in Chief of the award-winning publishing platform Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. (200 words)