The Loophole of Retreat, or The Love Below, as Above

I
see you,
peeping Tom,
beside yourself with
rage at what I done did,
hands gone idle from deprivation.
I see you, Uncle, with your fingers at the
trapdoor, to place crumbs of a biscuit at my mouth
in the dark. Through a hole the size of a mustard seed,
I affix my eye and become faith itself, become the all-seeing
god in female form, the grown woman grammar of Black vernacular.
Congregating mice enter my sanctuary, sniffing, praying with their teeth.
There go the train of my soul, dragging on the ground like a wedding gown.
The gravity of a grandmother’s black hole. Being, bound and intergalactic.
I, the wholeness of erasure, an invisible
matter hiding in an attic of entrapment.
Red ants eat through my legs, freedom
tiptoes on acid rain. Master don’t know
where I be. Unbecoming. I be winded
in a window gone South. Up North, I
levitate on trip wire, limbs suspended
in dank air, indecent ligaments, numb
accomplices. Desensitized. Hair matted.
Nails gnarled. I swallow the steely dust,
my alchemist lips bleed metallic, a sweet
tune to the touch of a broken tongue.
Hear my children singing from below?
Come closer! Let Momma smell you
through the walls, let Momma’s silence softly break.
This is what it means to watch over. This is what it feels like to hold your own.