“3 Attached” by Chebet Fataba Kakulatombo

Instead of enclosure or conservation projects of imperial nostalgia, bordered by time. The stink of daydreams and nightfishing floats all around like a sparkly cosmorama; loud wet-stains of sound, sloshing cotton watermarks, a sliding door leading to leaden pawmarked mud. The scents come from places we have been. Memories – former ticks and tocks – resituate themselves in dreamy lenses.

Softly, the recollection begins.

a riddling expanse
of blushing passages
slithering.
each-all attracted to
the warmth of feeling
repelled
by logic of censure
tracing, hissing, forgotten

then remembered.

The dance funnels strength from consistent and illegible course-correction. And meets itself over and over again, reintroducing color to palette.

See Attachment

This dance loosens the host’s ticks and tocks like pressure valves, freeing them from an otherwise of regulation. Motion is key to mind here. Mind sways in reverence to the smokiness of remembrance. A smokiness that trails and tickles truth.

In seeming chaos, the dance occurs outside conscious control and performs gentle amendments for its own sake.

ticks & tocks
anchored by familiar gaze
are suddenly flooded
by a sweet sugary molasses
that choke cadence
and make it hard to hear
difficult to locate
how it felt or when it felt
at the sedimentary
proxemics

at once

the wax brings noise
purring, slimy like okra
thrumming into the central nervous system
into imprecise cadences
subtle as a snake

intrusive and upsetting.

imprecise cadences
translate differently
with every replay
and reconstruction
a different jar of pickles in every sonic lurch

something lingers
something’s not

Forward Attachment

There are few directions the sugar wax flows that doesn’t leave static or muffled sound. Even when nobody is speaking.

Wax molasses — just another part of a canopy of interruptions. With many branches and leaves, interruption shades the presence & absence of ticks & tocks that engage in confrontation and homecoming.

Instead of oversight, the interruption canopy provides a stirring. Where ticks and tocks, diminished or congested, undergo an arbitrary & repetitive yearning process constantly in breach of space-time continuum.

In the soul, in a setting of interiority, the canopy sets off upturning,

a capsizal

an inversion,

a retrograde.

Drawing from the fascinating magnetism of the past. The canopy circles improvised call & response; a thawing between dimensions of truth; a time-syrup made from revisiting color-scorched imaginaries on a barebones spaceship.

gums

absorb teeth in a gasp,

taking back each-all

time passes through

Canopy is conjuring a setting, invoking a place. Beckoning ticks & tocks to depict a relation to truth under palm-shaped shadows.

Chebet Fataba Kakulatombo is a dancer who writes, interested in tending to freedom. Her work has been published on Burning House Press, Down River Road Magazine and As Equals Africa. You can find her on Twitter @fatabak.