The Tale of Alkebulan
The oceans sailed them back to the wealth of their African roots. / Today, no land dares offend or take her natural wealth for granted. / They no longer hold summits or video conferences to pressure her. / They no longer offer bribes for her fall or assume she is corrupted.
In Xalapa, I Practice Yoga as Maria Cleans Around Me
What I sacrifice for the freedom to travel: / pension, health plan, a living wage. / I’m considered casual. / Maria is called informal. / We both know what we really are: disposable.
Sonics
let’s take the word / scream / scream, screamed, / have screamed, / were screaming, / will scream, / are screaming, / be screamed / as in scream / me a nightmare / as in Soweto, South Africa / in the mid-nineteen seventies
People of Rice: Carolina Gold
everything / that was taken I seek to take / into my body and the salt of grief / salt of blood salt of the wide Atlantic / to eat, swallow, trying to remember all / that I have never known, / the dark germ, the winnowed husk
The Painter
Then I gazed at the rich, brown texture of a watercolor on the page, / a man’s tortured face, his beard, his tough glowing bronze skin. / You said it was a portrait of your brother, / who died overseas during a rain of fire in the Viet Nam war.
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-
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?”
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.
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?
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
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 