– After W. E. B. Du Bois

Wild irises purpling my mouth each dawning—
                                                                 trauma souring the quiet street.
Its whole dark field roots me down and down. The mock-sun a blank obscuring. Fire whips
white-shock of lightning, bright Molotov angel, what ash marks assume a coon cemetery.

And all the names scratched out.
                                                                 What burns this house burns apishly.
                                                                 The mouth the church this immaculate body
such untouchable sounds we have made of ourselves. A blues archeology. Thus like a snake I writhe upward,
mottling and spine-thick, where heavy nouns flay through my tubercular,

                                                                 their heavens coil a twisted rope. Your veiled suffocation.
                                                                 Unknown asphyxiate. The mourning-dove which scales
                                                                 its double gaze in tongues knows this: the broken world
                                                                 was always broken.

How does it feel to be a problem? The mute centuries shatter in my ear.
                                                                 The aimed black spear. This body, a crisis.
                                                                 A riot. A racket. The whole world whistling.

Harass me a savage state, vast hectares will tar this noon infertile, each day a prisonhouse, my sickbed
                                                                                                                     caulking each bloom a bruise.
Quick hands swathe me in miles of cotton. Now blood-stained sheets in my room.

                                                                 There is an old woman who is not my grandmother.
                                                                 There is an old sadness I was born to wear like a dress.
                                                                 She feeds me condensed milk through a bird-feeder
                                                                                                                                      and smiles,
                                                                 says don’t pay attention to the flies in my eyes.

Biography:

— from Safiya Sinclair‘s Cannibal, (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award.

This is part 3 in the series Fallen at Charleston, guest-edited by Brenda Marie Osbey.

Fallen at Charleston
Contents:

“How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way” by Martín Espada

“Notes on the State of Virginia, III” by Safiya Sinclair

“What a Fellowship” by Afaa Michael Weaver

“Black 101” by Frank X Walker

“Black Bird” by Terrance Hayes

“Live Oak” and “Riposte XIV” by Shauna Morgan Kirlew

“Fallen at Charleston” Introduction by Brenda Marie Osbey