andriniki mattis’ poetry debut Quiet Fires reflects his many experiences of new york black queerness. With trickster energy, mattis implores humour to spell out the dangers of being alive while dressing it down. His poems play kitten into realisation, sometimes soft and always sharp. Even as joy and pleasure permeate the page, so do the questions.
To paraphrase Christina Sharpe, what is afterlife if your ancestors were slaves in their own country?—a place where apocalypses happen every day. Sharpe writes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being:
Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased.
And later,
In the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical, social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life, Black life insisted from death? I want to suggest that that might look something like wake work.
And this is where I find mattis’ debut rages. It resists reduction and classification based on identity while interrogating identity and constructing Black thought and existence. Wake work:
We cannot help but “no” ourselves into oblivion, how dissociation may offer reprieve so that we can survive. We cannot help but know ourselves into existence. And through the process, maybe we hold onto the soft spark of who we know ourselves to be. Here, mattis provides kindling, spark, and oxygen.
“is there ever a party if you’re always working this skin” opens the collection and sets the tone with the title. Phrased as a question, without its marking, the title is reframed as an answer. The opening lines reflect the same tone, “if i were your garden how often would i / be tended to what fruit would i bear.” In this way, mattis first challenges the reader to think in his world, through his terms; he is sharing his fruit. He address us a few lines later:
this is the house xyou will live in
abandonment xan everyday act xof this country
& everywhere it wounds who you are building this house for
the secret xeverybody knows xthe ice of my eyes melting xtransgender in
america
an ambitious ritual they say xthe weather oppressive xnot just the four seasons
becoming two xhow they envy us xwith a bullet xin a nightclub
or a bruised ego put into law
Quiet observations seamlessly make plain the processes we carry in our bodies: gentrification, climate change, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, diaspora, policing, ever-present desire and longing… and still we find a way to be / sweet after the flinch of another’s touch. No one can look away, not even a shudder can shutter nor shatter the windows.
Death, explicitly & implicitly, plays on the page, hovers, lingers on foreground and haunts the background in mattis’s book. In “black mischief,” “there has always been heaven and hell in trees.” Spanning six pages, mattis gives us breathing room, even if we’re all breathing ash. “=== the sun / = will abandon us / ==== this way.” Nothing is untouched. Each page vignettes a scene, visually cinematic. Stanzas alchemise; lines shift stanzas along the pages. Stanzas turn to smoke, the sun—buttressing a crescent moon on adjoining pages—sets and rises. Punctuation becomes scattered chaos, delineates horizon. So that in the last stanza, the phrase “call it government call it memorial day” overwhelms, glares from the top of the page while
to be
x a bullet
to end xa world xso xxtouched xxlike a smile xso black xlike a heart.
This phrase is both grand and grounding, and grinds the poem to a halt. It burns the image into our retinas. I can hear Kerry James Marshall’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self,”(1986) laughing through his missing teeth.
In Quiet Fires, poems march in the street and shout through RAGE. They live through a pandemic. They cut school to go to Coney Island. Poems locate spatiality: move to Jamaica via Flatbush, Crown Heights to Brixton, to France. Poems reverberate with first loves, masculinity, the fog of breaking up, tsa selection.
While mattis is naming apocalypses, he exudes a “meditation of not giving a fuck.” Poems may be direct, coyly polite, and coquettishly buttoned up. mattis writes “(in progress),” “angry people want their anger in me / the world has its mysteries / drenched in rain / romance / always wrapped up / in some inconvenience.” He’s showing you enough to let you in while keeping himself safe and comfortable. He doesn’t dabble in language’s dexterity; mattis shows precision in his punctuation, capitalisation, spacing, word choice. The bounce of alliteration titillates the flow of assonance. A poet’s poet: sure, the words are stunning on the page, but this is giving face. And let’s face it, not every poem will let you wear it in public. Couldn’t quite get your lips around it, taunts the mind of even the most voracious readers. Everyone’s stumbled a word, got back up, and found their way. And yet, here is yours, graceful, smooth, rageful, quipping.
Isn’t that the point, when looking death in the eyes? Find a way to laugh or something. The poem “capitalism wants to know what’s in my pants so it can pay me accordingly” begins
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxo
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxsweet
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxgoodnight
xxxxxxxxxxxxxto every woman put upon me
xxxxxxxxxxxmonikers cashiers hurl xxneedling
questions xinto my skin xx\ \ left in the cooler to expire
frostbitten by time / / / / / / xcold again
my tongue stuck to a pole
a christmas story xxxfailing at femininity
xxfreed me
xxxxxcan i step into the picture frame
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxo hazardous joy
Paradoxically, joy becomes a known hazard. Its sparks, a caution. What does existence resemble when one is unable to emote freely while living with “an apocalypse in full view,” as mattis articulates in “i am nothing but explosions”?
“Apocalypse” is often thought of in biblical terms &/or that of catastrophic destruction. What about a 3rd thing? Originally, “apocalypse” is from Old English apocalipsin, via Old French and ecclesiastical Latin from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein ’uncover, reveal,’ from apo- ’un-’ + kaluptein ’to cover’; while only used twice in Quiet Fires, I posit that mattis utilises all etymological values. We get a sense of the biblical and the disaster mattis is uncovering. This is his “wake work.” We see what he sees, hear what he has named, no stone unturned. mattis’s tongue is untied, in the lineage of Marlon Riggs, whose seminal documentary was, in his own words, “motivated by a singular imperative: to shatter this nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” One can feel the reverberation of Riggs’s method in mattis’s work. We see the destruction and feel its revelation.
Every poem has a turn, replicating the multi-faceted conundrum of life. In the poem “how to live btwn the lines,” mattis writes,
my collarbone leaves space
for the tips of another’s hands
such pining
evenly carved
xinto the body
a moon holding its circle
while appearing bitten into
a sacred hollow
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx& isn’t this what breathing is for
i stand on pavement
slanting sunlight
this plywood chest
warmed sweetly by the sun
He goes back to the land, with questions of consequence.
unveiling skin
earth below
mined xof its wick xxx& who am i
to be treated xxif land can be ruled
by what xxit will outlive
This mirrors the opening lines of the book, “if i were your garden / how often would i be tended to.” I read this as relating Blackness, in and with nature, while in juxtaposition to apocalypse. Is capitalism the earth’s poisonous kiss of death? In “black mischief,” mattis writes, “the grass has a story of its own xxa village of black people lived here once pressing / / / the escape key from the purgatory of waged labor.” mattis refers to Seneca Village, expunged and reduced to Central Park, and the multi-million dollar views of the apartments that border it. There’s something reminiscent of Katt Williams’s interview on Club Shay Shay: “You know what the number one job of someone who sold they soul to Hollywood is? To act like it didn’t happen.” I hear an echo between mattis and Williams in the voicing what would be otherwise kept clandestine—like, say, a 400,000-strong protest against genocide not being reported on by major media outlets. Or perhaps, as “how to dissociate completely,” elaborates ramifications of gentrification: a native new yorker “becoming expendable / taken xxxby streets / that no longer / resemble / my home / & forget / how quick / i can be / filleted / for flowering / xxxxwild.” mattis is naming the stakes.
With “in a country where no one knows my name,”
we find new words
for death
for those unalived
by violent frontiers
violet veins
marked by impact
saddled indifference
a brute requiem
my country
of turpentine
of economy
over ecosystems
I swallow
I open
a harpsichord
a chrysalis
a quiet fire
Line by line, these poems give voice to the quiet fires inside of us, not necessarily given a chance to smoulder let alone blaze. Marginalised folks, often, who are given so little space to articulate emotion, let alone process grief, may find opportunity within these pages. One may feel a sense of power over quotidian microaggressions and overt oppression. Quiet Fires holds space for epiphany, for joy, for grief and everything in between.
Before I had a copy of this book, a friend came over to mine, excited to share a poem with me. Tearfully, they acknowledged they didn’t have words for what they were feeling previously, and through the poem, they felt seen. After my friend carried emotions throughout the week, the somatic release enabled catharsis. mattis contends in “silencing water”:
now you get high in in the woods
& cry to songs for dreamers
who have forgotten how to dream
& you misplace your reflection
in a light xtoo big for your hands
so it swallows you whole instead
grief sharpening your lungs
& you take to your unmade bed
then you hear the water xsilencing itself
for the first time
& you want to believe in believing again
this xsilence you have belonged to for so long
leaving you blanketed & barbed
Can you see, dear reader, how this sweet friend was able to crack open the barrier of themselves which led to a salty shoulder? Can you see how I’ve found myself alive through these poems, enticed & emboldened to share my experience?
After reading Quiet Fires, one may playfully think “I know your secrets...” and isn’t it nice to hear how someone else has withstood something similar and survived?
We are all quiet fires. RAGING.