A crab leaves the barrel
snapping your new Timberland.
A family of laughter is the baritone
for your one-footed prance until the shoe comes off.
My dark eyes know you, your swag and
all that was stolen to convince you
you could thieve from every kind
every kin except me.
I’m the little girl who loves seeing the whole tribe
together or at least my favorite side—
dishes collide yam and collard green juice in my mac & cheese
the crab meat we release from the shell
the moments we link up are stuck in my senses
I blend and pour on this page and the shores of this
ancestral homeland. Our core is love, alive, and loud.
I’m here to take the pictures and honor the frames.
Taped to the cell walls of your brain
I smile back at you, your rough along the edges
my dimples be the reason I have you wrapped around my finger.
Remember my copper face.
See our elders, the Gullah-Gechee
crimson cocoa onyx they are all we are
even more. My sister (your first cousin, on this side)
carries my nephew or niece.
Neither you nor I have children
to float in the space between
the last time you were seen
uncaged, alive, sober, clean.
Dannie Ruth is a writer and poet from Washington, D.C. Her poems have been published in Toho Journal, The Inquisitive Eater, and Queenzenglish.mp3: Poetry, Philosophy, Performativity (Roof Books, 2020). Her chapbook, Inside the Orb of an Oracle, won the Summer Chapbook Prize and was published with C&R Press (2019). Ruth holds an MFA in Poetry from The New School and has received support from Catapult, Cave Canem, and Aspen Words. She is also an inaugural cohort member of SeaSalted Honey’s Writing Residency in Senegal, West Africa.
