Migration Equation
My father is Nigerian on the brink of the Atlantic. With four children and a wife and three visas he must complete a migration in this lifetime. He has four children and some tickets. How many times can he return before his visa expires. Solve for X.
x is the water moving
x is the water
moving x is the water,
the water is moving
Every crossing costs $1,000. If he travels back, he will pay someone to care for children. If he tries to stay. If he applies for two visas. If his visa time is running out. If he leaves two children, they blacklist two children at the embassy. If the work permit is temporary. Solve for a future where no one will be eaten.
If you run aground in a country far from two of your children what’s a boat to forgive yourself?
new year winces in the sky. Money’s no good
at the embassy. spent everything to pay for school against forgotten water, against
immigration, to bring her closer
to our condition. Cold water on both sides
of the ocean. Rent money or tuition. Rent money for tuition.
Bail water from the boat.
My father must carry a fox a goat and a cabbage across a river by limited boat. He wants what he leaves behind to survive until he returns.
My brother must carry a fox and a cabbage across a river and feed two hungers.
My mother must carry a river.
My family is a river run out of boats. The crossing, wide water.
Desire Line Vibrant, Acousmatic
I tried to navigate the distance between the beep of a repo truck backing up and the cricket song nested in the walls of the basement of the house, the house the truck beeped away from. The crickets confounded the walls. There was a nook under the front stairs. There was a cubby in the back of the laundry room. They could’ve been singing from anywhere. The ground floor of the house was built into a hill, the front door was aboveground, the recessed rooms were buried. There were windows in the back that looked out into the dirt, so maybe the crickets sang from there in their interment.
Shared space with an unsourced sound, it could have been outside or a part of the house. Then outside didn’t end outside anymore. The crickets were outside brought so close that they collapsed the distinction between outside and inside. They drilled a porosity into the house. The sound of outsideness brought inside sang from both locations, from dislocation. Sounds that infest the inside with outside destabilize fragile relation. Systems teetered against each other inside and outside the house, the outside system opened its eyes in the windows of the house, wanted to see inside the system that was total darkness. The crickets were invisible in the walls or the ceiling maybe. The house chirped all night.
I tried to negotiate the distance between cricket song in the house and the beep of a truck in reverse. They try to let you wake up into the loss so the first sign of the truck was flashing light at 2 am; we were all awake. Maybe I was thinking of fireflies though I wouldn’t recognize their song. Maybe I was thinking of light as a frequency that laces into memory as sound. Maybe there was a sound I tried to fill in from the window two floors above the unhilled front side of the house where we watched my dad try to negotiate with the repo man. It all resolves as loss but you still try. The truck driver’s just a messenger. The truck’s beeping faded into the chirp of a cricket.
I tried to navigate the distance between bug song and a repossession. I walked to hug the curve of the railing by the road where the sidewalk disappeared. I had to walk home between lanes of instability on the road. The edge of the road looked jagged over a small creek. Fake ravine. There were only so many ways to get outside the house.
I tried to negate the distance between song confined in the walls and the retreat of a beeping truck in the otherwise silence of dark hours. The relation might be etymological. Cricket from the french criquer, which means to creak. The sound houses make under the movement of heavy bodies on the staircases. The house made entirely of cricket bodies, wings rubbing at that speed. Relation might be etymological. Declensions of a name. A long sigh or a siren contracted to a stridulation, stridulate, long stride, short stride—
I tried to naturalize the distance. I tried to neutralize the distance. I tried to stride in the gaps.
The messenger traverses the desire lines between helplessness and acceptance
Yea though I traverse on foot between the nature preserve and my apartment—yea though I move through the fear that a body is the interior of a home, a structure half buried and protective which accepts intrusions. Releases their sound as voice. Wear away verily.
I tried to investigate the distance between invasion and infestation. The driver’s silence at the frequency of orange light. Orange crease in my brain where song stays.
