towncrier.
my eyes / two dead seas / witness / daily slaughter / -the butcher’s feast, / the reaper’s bounty- / witness / -the healer’s gauze, / the morphine’s mercy-
Memory/I send myself
Slow, within the quiet pupil of the noisy scuffle the message arrives, and lands: You don’t know me. You’ve only heard about me. I know myself; I know my self. I re-member.
for girls who became glasses
for girls frail and brittle. for body crossed / with a disheveled spirit. & everything in / the name of gender distill / salvation. how much illumine a reflection?
Anesthesia
My Dearest Lilith. The world has tipped over onto its head and I am afraid. / Enough is enough and I am too weary to whisper / “No more?”
Home Affairs
I pondered on the moment a little more until I realized that the silence and awkwardness that characterized the room was a culmination of the disbelief of seeing white people in the heart of our township and having to come to terms with the possibility that they, too, could endure what has become such a norm in much of our lives.
We are Music
Come forth Orishas through our ancestors as ebo. / Write sonnets in Adinkra on our minds so we remember, / we are music rooted deep as the foundations of a nation / where our bones are bricks for monuments to liberty once denied.
Hate Speech
“My Dad doesn’t know that your Dad’s Black; he thinks you’re Mexican, so it’ll be okay.”
Gliding
And there was Solitude, / insurgent mother from Guadeloupe, / captured for abetting a slave rebellion. / They waited until she gave birth / to take her life. / Did she rock her baby through the night: / its first and her last? / Did she glide to a realm / where they could be free?
Keeping Brothers
My brother said he’d seen so many dead bodies / And had so much death around him / How could he weep for the poor faces of the Palestinians?
Everything Disappears
I think I disappeared in 1968. I think I spent three years in Bahia, but your Aunt Nires said it was much, much longer. Seven she says…I don’t know now. Could it really have been that long? Who knows…
Still Life with Parrot by Frida Kahlo
I remember the old wives’ tale / repeated too many times / to me when I was little / Spit out those watermelon / seeds or you’ll grow a watermelon
Sunday Mornings
My momma, who woke up before the roosters crowed and before the early birds tickled worms from the earth, was always the last person ready.
karibu
we are all zama-zama here / we dig & drill / our chances / we are all here / with our genocidal scars / tutsi & hutu
A Song About Living
today, the well in my grandmother’s garden is empty./I empty it. / In Vietnamese, nước means water, / means country.
On Origins and Dreams
On the Uber ride home, I remember / to scrape Arab from the tip of my tongue / just in time when the driver asks about the origins / of my name. Tunisian, I say. North Africa.
the Decolonial Passage 