All of This Is to Say

By Ever Jones

After Nell Irvin Painter

the body pushes sutures

to surface by isolating

and strangling the foreign material

from blood and capillaries

sent to compost the stitch

in the same way that

neon is a gas made visible

by sealing away other gases

which is why neon is so popular

in space and stars so fashionable

which is not exactly unlike the closets

of queer people who clad

our starbodies with stars, avoiding solidity

in neon capillaries which

when you think of  it has everything to do

with monsters who became history

when Pliny the Elder wander’d around

Caucasia, which was not a home

for white people but was a place before race

became a wound devoured and sutured

or became a monster, which might be a geography

of famine, entire continents of people

whose value is predicated on monstrosity

which does not dissolve in the body

or flash with light angular as flaming

but is used to light this planet with economy

rather than stars, in a persistent assimilation

of who is worthy of saving

and all of  this is just to say that wounds

wander bodies, ancestor to ancestor

which is why all of us hurt so much

licking open our wounds