is all that is seen / piano keys dance / click and clack / kick, slides cross empty palms / snap of
heels on concrete stairs / ledge unsteady as hot wind hurries through a field / cane field / flames
chase / sweet douse of tears that stopped crawling out lids / wet love potions / mixture of red clay
/ mother’s land soil that sleeps on forest floors / selected winds that surf tall field grass and hollers
between cotton barbs / drops of sun rays burnt through levees / scrapple of vodou watchwords /
drowns the battlegrounds drawn in the silence of black men. / deep- red bone legit ligaments
disconnect / but inner connectivity to what ails lonely thighs / tightly loose and ready to jump /
how wide. / rainbow’s toss sprinkles to douse her flames / speaks of nefertari and sheba’s yoruba’s
second cousin who spoke ibo / and dressed in mudcloth / and carried a nguni shield but spoke
xhosa / this black male smoke screen all over the place / as her emotions / as she fidgets in her
emptiness / in thoughts of a man who may speak ibo / xhosa / blackened english / and who holds
his head high for the love of clean water and black women / whose songs are wild hurricanes.
Bonita Lee Penn, literary curator, author of Testification of the Trees (2023 release) and Every Morning a Foot is Looking for my Neck (2019); her work has appeared in the anthology Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience (2022), and journals Taint Taint Taint Literary Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Women Studies Quarterly, and others. She is a Martha Vineyard Creative Writing Institute Fellow; a SEED Grant recipient for her multi-media poetic project “Gospel in the Wake.”
