This deep ocean of melancholy waving
through me, and all the doubts and
suspicions snapping like little turtle
neurons, flashing bulbs of insecurity
and a truth I have come to slowly accept.
These are the songs you hear from my
body. You stretch and press your feet
against my belly, the top of the fundus
bulges; at times my swollen breasts jump.
I feel you baby, I say, wondering if you
know this voice outside of its weeping.
I never intended for you to be lulled
by lamentations and fear, to wonder
at the fact of love, to question devotion,
to look in the mirror and read inadequacy.
This is the inheritance you must refuse;
these are gifts I never meant to give you.
Shauna M. Morgan is a poet-scholar who teaches creative writing and Africana literature at the University of Kentucky. She has published poetry in A Gathering Together, ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Interviewing the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Her critical work has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Atlantic Review, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and ariel: A Review of International English Literature, among other periodicals. Shauna tends to a hopeful ancestral garden in the Artists’ Village where she lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
