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upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

6.4K followers 2.1K following 21K posts

poet & nyeusiphile.

poetry collections: Deifying A Total Darkness; To Emit Teal; The Second Stop Is Jupiter; & The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife
👠👠 + 🎣👨🏿‍🦳 + 👰🏿‍♂️

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upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

from Black Stélé in the Hour of Chaos - hinting at the origins of the Virgin Madonna motif before the introduction of Jesus.

other heathens did it. and to this day,
conspiracy theorists still blame it on the cult
of Bill Gates traveling back in time
but mama says we should all keep our eyes
on them Nazarenes; troublemakers, the whole lot.
stealing Heru’s legacy anshit; they’re likely the ones
who pilfered his powerball, I wouldnt put it past them

November 26, 2025 at 10:34 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

sent three.

the poem i shoulda sent from the w.i.p.:

MORE THAN MUD or ORUNMILA CREATES THE
AFRICAN AMERICAN

MORE THAN MUD or ORUNMILA CREATES THE
AFRICAN AMERICAN

“why won’t it move?”
asks orunmila, kickin at a body of bones
fastened tight with reams of long green leaves
its small bouldering head, softly shouldered
by reeds & grass with balls of brass for hinges
“once it walks i will give it rhythm
& all the wisdom of the ages…”
orunmila kicks at a body of bones.
chukwu, elbow atop hand & chin in palm—
“remain calm, my dear friend… extoll patience
the sagacious holds the shape of your hands &
there exists no mold hidden from us.”
orunmila kicks a body of bones, rolls it
to the river and cakes it in mud.
eshu suggests “perhaps it is broken;
send it to america, i say, where defectiveness
is a virtue.”
“you say that for everything.
and it is far from defective… it remains
reflective of its Maker, like a lowering mirror
devoid of care & polish. more precisely,
it’s simply unactivated.”
orunmila kicks the body of sticks and bones.
“it is spiritually exogenous,” chukwu explains,
“tin foil for a soul! no wonder!”
orunmila kic— “and, please, stop kicking it!”
“yes. its soul is wrapped in too much foreign foil, i see.
and why i ever let eshu talk me into this use of
formaldehyde, i’ll never know!” *tosses it aside*
— beneath its ribs a vespid chignon.

its new head: a bottle-gourd brimmed
by the gods with 1,000 cowries & 1,000 teeth;
the lifeless chawbacon layered in souffle
of mire & tar & honey to shine—even
when eclipsed & absorbing darkness
orunmila kicks a body of bones:
“old gourd-head, you are more than mud,
so arise & be; arise and be everything—a body
unbound, no boundary to your being!”
chukwu, astounded, stood;
eshu, shook, astonished.
and in unison they shout:
“its eyes! how round! how wide
they’ve opened; the night-poem chirping
in its bellow of lungs & with hands upon
its belly you can feel its tripe rearing up!”
the prone sewn with sun
cheered forward by its pantheon
becomes a people’s dawning fountainhead
the seedbed for incipient morn
—this kicking volley of wry black bones.

November 26, 2025 at 7:55 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

rainer maria rilke
ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

Archaic Torso of Apollo

By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated By Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

November 26, 2025 at 9:28 AM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

i co-sign on this bullshit ‐ all the thumbs up on yee-haw's HOT DAMN DILLS... takes me back to the quality heat of the hot banana peppers my older sister was hoarding under her bed back in the 70s.

dark photo of a near-empty glass jar of spicy hot pickles

November 26, 2025 at 8:24 AM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

A DIRT SALE.

starting December 1st, the pdf for my first collection, Deifying A Total Darkness, will be available for FREE (or, yaknow, "paywhutchalike") through gumroad.com/upfromsumdirt ... the paperback will be a slender $10.

discount will end on my birthday, January 21st, 2026.

photo of the white paperback bookcover for my poetry collection with an illustrated figure dressed in red shirt & black jeans, with blue sneakers & baseball cap. he holds a black & gold sword while standing over a subdued (if not dead) lion with a severed front paw. a sun with the stylized facial features of african art shines down from above.

November 25, 2025 at 9:26 AM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

ending from Caul & Response (Deifying A Total Darkness)

3.
anyway, Orishas are origami for crepuscule
with college-rule; newsprint folds into a paper crown
covering the Ori of this living orator.
language is as lawn-chair for the living dead
and southern pidjin is my grateful Egun; black poems
parade our ashes in a natural state of ashé.
like a QueenMother, Black Memory pulls a halo
from a 3rd world pelvis, so (by portent), I indulge
in a self-induced patina: the policy stamping
the null and the void on every one-sided transaction
where all sales were said final;
the merchandise from transatlantic trades relinquished,
refurbished, refinished & returned home

(or wherever.)

November 24, 2025 at 7:53 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

don cherry & ornette coleman

phito of two men standing outside near a red building with clapboard wood siding. the man on the left is don cherry, wearing a black sweater with arms crossed holding a trumpet. he is faces the second man who wears a brown sweater, is facing straight ahead, and blowing a saxophone.

November 24, 2025 at 7:17 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

not to be outdone by UPK's 40% off sale (including my collection, The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife) WSUPress also has a 45% off sale for their titles, including my collection, The Second Stop Is Jupiter -
wsupress.wayne.edu

use discount code RHOLIDAY at checkout. 🥰

pink banner for wayne state university press's book sale announcing 45% off all books.

November 24, 2025 at 3:36 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

Carrie Mae Weems, Portrait of Myself as an Intellectual Revolutionary, 1988 Gelatin silver print.

a brown-skinned woman is seated facing us at a clean desk containing a notpad before her, a white landline telephone, and a dark-colored shaded lamp. behind her framed on the wall are 3 photos of revolutionary figures.

November 24, 2025 at 9:41 AM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

my monday mood.

photo of writing scribbled on the back of someone's black letter coat that reads "i don't need supreme. fuck off."

November 24, 2025 at 9:33 AM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

ANANSI WITH THE LAUGHING FACE

$this million mosquito arch, this swarm song of sand & asphalt as feral as we are floral said to be inconsequential with our serial slang the “artless” with a gargoyle’s yodel nacreous words that gargle the candescence of sun sculpting fractals of god from geometries of sorrow / see it says so right here: written in central african sanskrit on the back of some kentucky slaver’s bill of sale - it’s just you have to hold it to the sky in full light against the sun where all will see.$

November 23, 2025 at 1:26 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

no worries, friend.

i havent abandoned my beloved hot pepper flakes in coffee, but it has been a minute...

i started off years ago with hot sauce in coffee but to get a good kick adds vinegar to the taste, so i switched to the flakes. but hot honey has also worked & im gonna try a new brand. 🤞🏿

near 6am photo of a bottle of Local Hive Honey Hot Sauce surrounded by various other bottles of syrups and spices on a marble cutting board.

November 23, 2025 at 11:00 AM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

my timeline got bars...

screenshot of two unrelated posts on my timeline from two different people; the top says "iphone cameras can do neet shit"
a following post says "bleak shit"

identities have been redacted.

November 22, 2025 at 10:01 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

i love grippos' hot popcorn but can never find a bag when i want it, so ive come up with my own microwave recipe: ¼-⅓ cup white kernel corn, a tblsp of COLD butter (room-tempered will burn), several shakes cayenne, ½ tsp of salt; pop for about 3 mins; add generous amount of nutrional yeast after.

photo of white kernel popcorn, sun luck chili oil, cayenne pepper, and nutritional yeast.

November 22, 2025 at 5:08 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

Major on his process as a writer & artist from a 1997 interview in Callaloo —

In a 1997 interview with Callaloo, Major – a prolific novelist, poet, and painter – connected his experience of writing to his experience as a visual artist:

“Well, I’m a visual thinker. I imagine the thing before or as I am developing it on the page, and I can see it…But in writing and in painting, you don’t put everything in. Even if you’re a Nature painter, for example, you go to Nature for inspiration and you change it. It’s never really been a matter of translating Nature to the canvas. It’s a matter of selecting and rearranging nature, which is what you do when you write a scene. You select the elements that are going to make the scene come alive. And anyway, you could not possibly put everything in.”

November 22, 2025 at 1:15 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

what appears to be a sketchy block print illustration of a figure in green ink on green paper then reversed beside it in blue ink on blue paper

sketchy illustration of a figure down on all fours with balls for hands and feet

this is the 118th title from this
press and is the first to try a
combination-accordian
double-pamphlet binding.
the edition is 130 copies handset
in veteran 16 pt sabon antiqua
and printed by a vandercook sp I5
without electrification using
several colors. the papers are
handmade here in the barn and
in japan. the reader can imagine
the printer reading this text with
his fingers, wondering all the
other words made by these
twenty-six lead soldiers.

wh/20 july 1992

November 22, 2025 at 1:15 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

Parking Lots, a poem by Clarence Major, was published in Mt. Horeb, WI, in 1992, in a limited edition of 130 copies by Walter Hamady's Perishable Press. Laura Dronzek illustrated the book.

pamphlet style bookcover showing an illustrated aerial map of a city in blue, pink, and white sections. Major Parking Lots 118/0033 is printed in a tan box.

front matter listing the poem, poet, and publisher.

All across America we
travel,on and on
and I remember Heather
saying, All I need
is a post office
and a liquor store,
but the sky is good,
withbreasons drawn clear
like afternoon light.

Up here in Elkins Park,
in the house,
in our brightest room
the light is bright
(out across rainland,
dotted with fastfood joints,
over in Jenkintown,)
from the wonderous freeway
Nobody worries too much
about anything up here:
when the gas goes
call the gas man
when the lights go
call the light man.
Just like in that resort town.
Remember?

Am l shifting him,
drifting him out into
vacant lots
random with unearned innocence,
rage or the suspended rage
flaunted by his home?

What still amazes me
is how quickly the shock
passes.

Clarence Major.

November 22, 2025 at 1:15 PM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

james baldwin
UNTITLED

block print illustration of a pomegranate; red ink on cream paper.

Untitled

Lord,

when you send the rain,
think about it please,
a little?

Do

not get carried away
by the sound of falling water,
the marvelous light
on the falling water.

I

am beneath that water.
It falls with great force
and the light

Blinds

me to the light.

November 22, 2025 at 10:10 AM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

GYPSY & Other Poems by James Baldwin

block print, black ink on blue paper, of the face of james baldwin.

title page for baldwin's collection for gypsy. gypsy is in all caps in red print. and other poems and james baldwin appear in black ink. the gehenna press with date in roman numerals appear at the bottom.

November 22, 2025 at 10:05 AM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

Optica Cerebral: Poemas Dinámicos by Nahui Olin (Carmen Mondragón)

block-print illustrated bookcover of a pink-skinned woman with large green eyes. the poet's name and book title are printed in a stylized font.

November 22, 2025 at 9:20 AM

upfromsumdirt

@upfromsumdirt.bsky.social

found this on tumblr & it has me flashing back to my great-grandmother's 2-story shotgun home, the memories of me sliding down the banister & spinning its loose spokes...

i just wasnt expecting to be carried back like that this morning & now im fighting feels...