Then I Will Speak On The Ashes
       

This is a story about borders and migrations When the rains fall in the sea organs blacken reservoirs of drinking water we sort and dry the rows of derelict greens cracked fauna now cisterns on the margins of wooden houses its lines of vulnerability transform into arks as the weather turns on us The grounds absorb the trauma of drooping foliage Impotent gris-gris no longer potion or whirs into the waste of human industry Our food is the bloodied livestock its spoils leave hunger in the zephyr We try to replace what we lost among the rows of derelict limbs uniformed membranes the cauterized eye of the storm unseeding grains the white resin of starvation, the flutter tonguing from the dry folds of their undersides The last sweet remembrances of dates and cassava No daily bread, solely the chewed meat of skeletal petals its ligatures of hunger white as asp in the faun The slithering tongues color the scab what prophecy Amistad is a revelation snuffed I hear these tabernacles can't blood a she song bring flight will sea? more scab than skin spears I want it Black Crime it here in this crystal jar Liberation I have always been here my overgotten The lived that relive cannot she freedoms jungled confessions a coating of damaged pedaling away to the volatile sublight she a constellation of widowed cities Yet she barren a disappearing lake Darkness ways be light she-reflections she's skiffs the lip of damaged estuaries in red seas of reduction Shock in the layers of ruboff Memories confess snubbed essences of wrong loves Found in barbs of flowers a fen through the mesh of midcollapse there she be a woman with hair of thatched palms buoyant in a working wagon with a bottleneck of blue fibers an upstream porch nested with water ghosts in pitched tents she carried lints of corpses from tubs of riverrain on her skin she is a gutterwoman these voices spit knuckled only by a colored woman's reminiscents that spawned her Black nerves

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Copyright © 2021 Cynthia Parker-Ohene All rights reserved
from Black Warrior Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission