Older Shadows

Tongo Eisen-Martin

My home has finally hosted a welcome


                         An approach to the body


Window curtains dry heave a greeting…

On behalf of this corpse…thankless foreshadowing…wrenched spines rolled into one  

    lovely

street being…San Quentin mortgage…spinning the commune gun…my political

    brother


I noticed the legs first


unfinished short’nin’ bread on a table painted for reconstruction and noose futurism


porters on a thunderbolt


interpreting dreams in a poem and I don’t have a lot of time

riding poverty through the night’s bracketed belly

alongside bumpers adorned with colored ribbons made of flesh

alongside nouveau-meek…little mister disfigured psyche…dressed in the new thread

count…birth of execution-method-diversity-beings…mass voicings of copper 

    jackets…

starved-

for heroes with fantasies of being “relevant to power”


Through ghettos of exhaustion


I noticed the torso part of fear


I deny the united states exists


Older shadows pulling politics from a panicked body

Writing hand loose…distracting the streets from love and happiness

Pulling an anthem out of the cemetery that they fed my favorite people to


Missed the entire spring to a sadness I even let show…portrait displayed inward…

Audience in the back of my father’s skull…face bruised and relaxing…running fingers 

over the thousands of racist scalps…roosting in firing pins


Of course they put me in the ground, for sure, but not enough of me

to keep me out of the tarot card I will beat into your face, officer, respectfully


And what…you troubled by these boring scenes of unity?

Tongo Eisen-Martin is the author of three collections of poetry, including Heaven Is All Goodbyes. He lives in Detroit.
Originally published:
September 8, 2025

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