A homegrown obsidian shout into silence. Hunger was an earring. A Shining Thing. A scaffold threaded with water lilies and old tin cans. What finds its way into the dirt, passes through the dirt, travels balancing sandstone, sinew, and source. Gutbucket theorems of the Bandiagara, when the fire went, on the living rock raw. Dogon A.D. For seven years we danced but a single dance beneath the Eye Star, with saxophones and cloud hooks, as twin crocodiles carried off cups of rice. One lyric, one rite remains. The Hard Blues and The Mother of Masks. Processions of talking rocks snake through the sorghum. This is the Song, sounded. Pushed by strings it soon bakes into a field holler, precedes the notional, and that left ear waiting in a granary since the time of the Tellem to pass these signals to the sky. A radio wave. The science of surplus. The empty stomach and of what makes more. Follow this, then, until you come to the first crossroads. It’s a crossroads you can eat.
Jeffrey Little | Most Things Just Haven’t Worked Out Contents | Mudlark No. 47 (2012)