Dear sly stone,

Let me make friable a story, stone by stone, from
this throat. Coming up my whole image
repertoire was made from you singing; to me
it felt like an attempt, a circle gathering
of debris around the song, shavings
of matter at every stage of its emergence,
dust trailing an irritant comet through
the atmospheres of your throat.
My throat tightened around the heat
of the irruptive, slow magma forcing
underground to disturb a long
hardening of speech. Cosmic time
under the spark of a gasless bic
lighter. Apocryphal crack rock. The hinge
Of a heavy door releasing a year
Of lightlessness
with patience like needle burrowing blue
veins beneath the groove. A weak orange
surge in the filament bulbs attended the click
of our hand-cranked generator reaching the end
of its diesel tank, the engine turning slowly
to dusk. Then how did night fall? Slowly
And it burst, star by star like that into song’s
evacuations. The self absences they framed sputtered
Like a mouth letting the dark in, station by
station to the trachea. I hear there’s a riot
going on. I unhinge my jaw to hear
myself, then I sigh your static out.

—

from Dear Sly Stone–published by Spiral Editions.

Get the book through trickery or glad-handed deceit? I think it’s out of print.

—

Tobi Kassim’s writing has been published in The Volta, Chicago Review, The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, The Boiler, Obsidian, Poetry Northwest, Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, Four Way Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by Undocupoets, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Cave Canem. He was a finalist for the 2025 Furious Flower Poetry prize, and his chapbook Dear Sly Stone was published by Spiral Editions.