& the facts often vanish after the fact. I will never be the lawyering kind. Litigiousness being far from a kind of freedom. & feeling is the texture of my memory & there are few words to convey it wholly. I movement for outlaw, prophecy, earthen procession, not on the calendar of the world. & maybe what’s at stake is the difference between movement & a movement or the movement. & maybe what’s at stake is our collective enchantment & chanting matter, canted blackness, uncountable. & what if this is our existence: practice of chant, a ceaseless incantation & ceaselessly inventive liturgy?& & faces often vanish after the face. Aphantasia quasi una sonata. Absence of face, I cannot save face, always almost a song. I sometimes recognize you by your scent, your sound, your tattoo, your peculiar aria of body. Our ancestors sweep us together by their own mathematical equations, wringing out geographies & timescape callings. Their improvisations jazz away from doctrinal upbringings. How earth, how medicine you are. A litany of afters, a liturgy of reachings. & the fact of autism has been a power binge for those wary of stray. As if crip failure were not my intention all along. My perpetual molt a subterfuge of norms & concretions. As if the inevitable outcome of unmasking is the best drag show in town.&
- & In this ampersand, italicized words are directly cited from, and other language weaves with, Fred Moten’s essay, “Base Faith.” ↩︎
- & This offering from Rivka Nisinzweig. ↩︎
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Ephemeral, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, Wayward Creatures, and the forthcoming Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal. Their poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in American Poetry Review, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alocasia, Poetry, and Waxwing, among other places. They live in southern California.
