I heard that
It rained outside again;
not that type of storm that you hear,
loudly:
the red reigning showers,
burning pines—ap—peals,
skies, a loose sieve
Our tempest, long-winded—
hourglass shards twisting time
into silent sand mounds:
Nightshades’ severe temperament
Illy-oozing dystopic ether
Malleable breaths betrayed
Brick-and-mortar dust
Yellow buzzers’ sundown
I can’t breathe,
We cried for one—an “other” again;
not that type of chorus that you forget,
accidentally:
mourning in echo—low occasion,
bird songs in fall—set to blues,
free dim innuendos, a swansong
All of us, caught in her eye—
tip toeing tight ropes
over the rickety time we got:
99 problems, & a weight in sea is still but
one, bleached, synthetic scion, drifting in zero-sum—
one fiery drill away from was
Rasheena Fountain is an essayist and poet from Chicago’s west side. She has been published in Hobart, Penumbra Online, Jelly Bucket, The Roadrunner Review, Crazyhorse, You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, and more. Fountain received a 2021 Honorable Mention from the Trillium Arts “Miss Sarah” Fellowship for Black Women Writers. Fountain earned a M.A.Ed. in Urban Environmental Education from Antioch University Seattle and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington Seattle, where she is currently a Ph.D. student in English. She is working on a multi-genre memoir about nature, environmental justice, decolonization, land, and Blackness.
