you and me in the cloud

updated infrared image of our galaxy taking into account the star-birthing wave

For Cheryll Y. Greene

Yesterday morning the moon shone through the clouds on me like a searchlight. It was giving i will never leave you, i will always know you, nothing but death can keep me from you The Color Purple vibes. If I could I would play hand clap games with the moon. I never get over how someone so far away and completely on her own schedule and ever changing always feels like my best friend as soon as I see her. Actually, when I put it that way, it makes complete sense, because that’s the type of friend I am to you. Randomly beaming in your face like you know where I been all this time. It feels like the moon always finds me. And so, yesterday morning I jumped directly into the clouds.

If you get on an airplane right before sunrise in Durham and fly west you can slow the rate of change. Right? Or is earth just so multiple she stretches time? Because from here the eastern cities look like galaxies and then the midwest slowly reveals her patchwork blanket of agricultural claims, and now this desert looks like a muted Mars. How many worlds are there?

Trick question! The universe always makes more worlds. Today I learned that astronomers call the nearby galaxies birthing stars “clouds” because from here they look like misty gatherings in the sky, making stars instead of rain.

Can you imagine? When my mother said my head was always in the clouds, I wasn’t even saying things like, hey, did you know that from the perspective of Durham a galaxy looks like a cloud but from the perspective of the clouds Durham looks like a galaxy? And couldn’t astronomers have guessed that poets would come behind them to reuse all these metaphors or else critique them. I mean, who uses a phenomena of the sky as a metaphor for another phenomena of the sky, unless sky is all you know? Who sells NFTs for crypto unless they plan to never land on earth?

The two times my mentor Cheryll Y. Greene scolded me were both related to the cloud. The first time was when I posted pictures of Cheryll and her new laptop on facebook without asking and the second time was when she found out how much important information Sangodare and I used to keep in google docs. Cheryll Y. Greene the great editor of the people, those people being Assata Shakur, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and many more, knew something about discretion, and the dangers of instantaneous publication (like this) and data storage. Not because she was a tech expert, but because she was a Black editor of Black writers who co-intel-pro had high on their list of people whose words might spark revolutions. They had to decide what they wanted to say about themselves and when. For example, it was Cheryll Greene who stewarded Assata Shakur’s first public statement to her community after she escaped the prison called the United States. Exactly when, exactly where we should first hear from “our sister in exile” as Cheryll called her in Essence Magazine.

Cheryll helped make Essence Magazine an incubator of stars in the 1970s and 80s. I think she made every one a better clearer writer. I have seen the manuscripts (though I will say..very little red pen on Toni Morrison’s drafts), but the real reason I know Cheryll’s “editors eye” could transform writers is because she transformed me. And sometimes I wonder if the reason not enough people know Cheryll’s name is because she was so careful not to leave too many traces.

I went with Cheryll once to shred her documents, pounds and pounds of paper that we loaded up after cancer had already eaten through her shoulder. We took them to a truck somewhere in Harlem that would eat and spit out histories right in front of you, truckloads of snow from some soft pixelated planet.

Am I an airhead for using social media apps that allow information about me to flow to government agencies and corporations through the checked boxes of terms and conditions? I am typing pages from my journal into digital perpetuity via airpiane wifi when I’m 96% sure that Cheryll burned her journals before she died. How am I Cheryll’s literary daughter?

Is this merely a generational difference? Stars are born when clouds collapse. What they call star nurseries really look like flaming clouds lit through some internal sunrise. And a new close gas formation called the “Radcliffe wave” is changing what astronomers think the shape of our galaxy is or ever was. They call the wave Radcliffe because Harvard astronomers called it and so shouldn’t we think of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study when we look at the sky, and maybe not think about how Harvard said the “unknown” mental capacity of women meant women shouldn’t be admitted to Harvard, even though Ann Radcliffe was one of the original donors to the scholarship program in the 1600s. A business woman who outlived her husband, Ann Radcliffe’s contribution recuperated through the short-lived women’s college and the institute that replaced it. But what about British Ann Radcliffe’s lucrative 15th century investments that put her in the position to be the first woman donor to Harvard in what could only be colonial projects linked to the transatlantic slave trade? I say the Radcliffe wave’s oceanic referent is actual the middle passage.

Which means that if we were to see a star being born right now through an expensive Harvard telescope, or more likely through their private servers, that star would have been born 8.800 years ago, long before the technological shift we call colonialism through which the speculative sale of people could fund astronomy research centuries later with interest.

I can’t say what any of this means from here. I am now data aggregatable and being reproduced even now by AI’s brain. Which I guess means you don’t need me, or that the interest in me I am generating in you right now will benefit whoever owns the AI application where you will one day ask the chat bot “give me an essay in the style of Alexis Pauline Gumbs about clouds as clouds and clouds as unborn stars and clouds as galaxies and clouds as archives” and it won’t matter that you never knew how Cheryll died the night before her 70th birthday, or that you weren’t there when I tried to record her life story the last time I saw her, but instead we watched the clouds changing into colors I still can’t describe over sunset through every window in her apartment. The clouds themselves and the clouds becoming more beautiful again reflected in the Hudson River.

I agree to the terms and conditions and post my ramblings online because I want you to know about Cheryll immediately. Because as Barbara and Beverly Smith said we have no way of knowing whether we or our movement will survive long enough to become safely historical. Because I still remember what all my sister Women of Color Bloggers taught me which is that our brilliance can flood the system with alternative possibilities even while capitalism learns to steal everything we are and everything we think we have. Or maybe it is because that great editor who I really want to read this first draft is dispersed out among you and I miss her.

But keep on treating me like the moon and saying you needed to read exactly this exactly today. Because I love you so much that I will never be able to hide from the wolves or the advertisers. You will always be able to find me out here moonfaced and howling your name as if it could reclaim the stolen claims, and name this whole universe for you light years before they come gentrify this air. Every cloud in my eyes is a galaxy, every breath is your birthday you star.

P.S. I love you every day. Come find me here.