Quantum Entanglement: The Warmth of Other Suns/When Grief Was But a Word
by MAXIME BANKS
in Spring 2024
Julia Mallory, I Am Sending My Grief Through to the Earth That is Perfectly Formed, 2020, Acrylic on canvas board, 11 in. x 14 in.
Quantum Entanglement: The Warmth Of Other Suns
Syncopated South
howled voices mass dark rhythms
hallelujah sing!
Ions of cotton
eat dark energy spacetimes
plasma universe
When southern shadows
whisper me secrets undead
Mississippi writhes
Illiterate X
fled grip hanging blood rope trees
sharecropper Granddaddy
Quantum entangled
twinned throat photons harangue hope
hauling Black Joy waves
Spacetime travellers
coccyxes weight bowed train rails
burdening cornbread
Of ten flew eight: Chi,
West, factory steel, war, my
mama Mabel, me
Boggy Delta flee
grasp icicled concrete breath
North’s veins sprawled redlined
Blackeyed peas cornbread
Mama's sweet potato pie
praise hallelujah!
Tongue incandescent
My throats be copper wire
Conduction breaths flow
Quanta textured time
Remembering the future
Pharyngeal mute
Sucking darkness in
I swallow the Universe
I glut all the stars.
When Grief Was But a Word
When grief was but a word
which had no true echo
in my heart
no taste to tongue
no glottal sound
i was blind
swimming deaf in ocean life
descending deep
deeper deep
heartbeat slow
my eyes like bloodshot oysters.
When death was but a word
which had no true echo
in my bone but
i held my breath
in my mouth
mouth smiling happy times
waiting the coming exhalations
i held my breath in my mouth
mouth smiling happy times
waiting the rushing ocean waves
waves of exhalations.
When grief was but a word
no true echo in my cranium
Mama’s red rosebush blooming
sun radiating silence
sun radiating our yellow home
silence thick like butter
silence thick like milk
raw fresh from Wisconsin cow
drinking gulps of ocean creatures
unbeknownst of time
buried beneath ocean skin
erupting.
Maxime Banks is a time-traveller of the Black American Diaspora with Chicago, Mississippi roots. Within her Afronaut Anatomy Autoethnography Archives she reimagines Black womanist beingness in the Universe. She explores the intersections of visual art and science, poetry, painting and performance, mathematics, sound, quantum poetics, collage and cosmology expressing radical vibrations of freedom, imagination, joy and resistance. In her Mabel’s Garden studio laboratory she creates DNA self-portraiture that reference ancestral memory and mathematical concepts such as the helix coil and knot theory. Material experiments using her own hair and handmade chemical, biological, botanical pigment inks. This Black woman’s hair is a cosmic coil counter-narrative, a mathematical artefact. Maxime was commissioned by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art/MMoCA for the imaginary i 2023/2024 exhibition. She composed Scar Sonic Soliloquy: Love Orbiting The Square Root Of Infinity, a poetic sound performance installation. MMoCA recently acquired her painting, Afronaut Anatomy Archives: Quantum Blackness Spacetime Orbits As Coordinates Of Being, for the museum’s permanent collection. She made her theatrical debut at La Mama Theatre with The Silver Lioness: A Philosophy Of The Universe, a one-woman performance she wrote, produced, directed with original costume design. Maxime earned B.S., B.A., B.F.A. (Honours) degrees in Biology, Biochemistry, Philosophy and Fine Arts from universities in the USA and Paris, France. M.F.A. postgraduate research study at the University of New South Wales/UNSW Art & Design in Sydney, Australia. She lives and creates on the unceded lands of the Wurrundjeri and Boonwurrung sovereign peoples of the Kulin nation in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Presently, she’s writing her first poetry collection and a children’s book for 2024 publication.