Gerald Majer

Gerald Majer's work appears in Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Yale Review, and other journals. Their book The Velvet Lounge was published by Columbia University Press. They recently completed a book on Baltimore free music, The Vibe Notebooks, and also last year the experimental poetry book Nor Were Wey Afraid. New work appears this year in the Chicago Review, Sonora Review, and Callaloo. Instagram: Gerald Majer

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Nor Were Wey Afraid

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Way wey waver in urr walk

WEY USS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!~

with proximities

with contagions

wey brimming rooms

studying parts athwart

wets gathers

far fair air

clouding uss

wey hold close

move uss together with sky

move uss together with well

to speak otherwise:

uss, the holes in the water  

adversaries crowd urr path

wey can't reach uss the fogs

in great banks on great rivers a fundamental weakness

buildings compounds facilities works

wey going away and when the kisses change doors

wey lover uss all the mourn

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Oozes with sex and brains and natural disasters.  Dropping to one knee, another knee, goes all knees. 

A June afternoon with necklaces spilling. 

Mapping the bricks and vines.  One street over keep on walking, one street over keep on walking, one street over keep on walking. 

Odalisques, arabesques, palladiums, undulations, futilities, bastions, geese and poplars, holding down, upstaging, whiffs, flusters, antiphons.

The countryside with its mud and its trees, and its moons buried among trees, and its leafy morning ditches.

Gift strands, hills of rain, the village dogs behind the main-street houses, the shadow that follows the rope morning till night. 

And the other rope, the one half-coiled, half uncoiled.  Wey walked that one, centuries, a moment, all of uss wey rivers.

Zooms, trifles, justices, queer turns, flailings, lifts, plays, plays.

Certain rends, and trills, venous trails, avails, novitiates, hopefuls, understudies, which means guides, violations, exceedings, pitting and coppice and driving home through a dream.

wey walking through leaned and lateral/ wey without a plumb, a plume

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Mariupol, Hurov Park, the sounding fountains are GONE

                                    sustained devotional loops

wey a cloud walking a circle

ussh ussh

offerings

wey come to pleat to fold wey come to skirts and whirls

                        to stir urr speeds

                        urr tendering

on the boulevard tonight, the couples dazzling, untenable, dangerous

                        wey write in sleeves wey in streamers on wind

                        long feather arc of urr style and urr dare and urr sworn sword

urr dear blur

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wey keep remembering them urr fountains

                                                            wey keep remembering them urr uss

wey have heard these dancing waters all day and all night

                                    wey can't sleep through the fizz and bliss

            ways the sound fountain

                                                                                                the fountain sound

                                                gets in everywhere, as if out there is

                                                                        making cheerful blood

as if out there is telling uss on uss

Write something that ‘touches

                        itself

                                    everywhere at once,’

                                    Samuel Delany tells the audience

in Philadelphia in June

                                                                                    the library fans creaking

­­                                                free air

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urr baseline is a stick that would be

                                                whirling cape drape

how about it wey take these

creepy water steeples

                                                 and prick them into ground

                        and gush the lush

                                    how about it

                            wey take the famous foamy bells

and ring them into sunk buckets

swimming

                                                 out of urr depth

how about it wey pluck

                            fountainass plume

                                    and fuck it into downscale map

where spillings spill spilling

            without any body

            wey have to remember

                                   wey ill clueless

where wey are vanishing from

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