Bone Conduction

i know your voice  	as slaughterhouse
i know your shape 	as serrated crescendo 
i know our names
                                        as they curse 
                                        the curve of time        and rot within empire
i know your kiss 	        as pockmarked silence
                                        a split hammer
                                                   a battered anvil			
			                                                         cochlea 	
                                                                                 masoned with clot

i remember your hand 	
at the base of my neck
              vibrato/full of intent
			              your song
			              a skeleton of coast fingered into dark soil

save me 
              from your absence 

		
                              make me your lower thing

	
                                       coward 		you

you love me too much 		to bear an arrival	
                             afraid of how fully
 	                                               we blot out the known world

                                                    now i scrounge in unnavigable dirt 
scrape my skull across brown earth
hoping a lesion may lead    to an echo of your voice

i cannot hear it
i cannot hear it
		bereft
				       i cannot		 
		
the quiet builds					
                                       and will not crest

---

Quenton Baker is a poet, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. Their current focus is black interiority and the afterlife of slavery. Their work has appeared in The Offing, Jubilat, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus and elsewhere. They were a Robert Rauschenberg Artist in Residence and received a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. They are the author of ballast (Haymarket Books, 2023) and the beast comes to you as smoke (forthcoming in 2027, Haymarket Books).