How does it feel to be something man hasn’t touched? Nothing
feeds your shape – how tall you want to aim, the texture from
root to tip, or the colors you choose to shake off like makeup.
It must be nice to have no load bearing walls—nothing to hold
you down or box in all you want to be. Like those paintings
of Black folk with blooms in their hands, white dandelion fluff
like spun sugar and unbruised stems that can also be used for tea.
Or those photos of little girls and hand games where you can hear
echoes of Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack. They always look clear-
eyed and ready for dreaming. Is it possible to inherit historical
PTSD? The hunting party I mean other artists glide through your
arms so easy, while my body in this Sly and The Family Stone
t-shirt is in full rebellion, a tongue spit-quiet. Usually nothing good
comes from people like me walking among trees—too much dog
and bark and search lights bouncing off moon skin. Is that image
from a movie or a flashback from a great grandmother’s dream -
something fed to her by her father? I want to walk through with
the ease of a kiss, like I know I have peaches and ice water
waiting at home, like the Sun don’t got nowhere to be but here.
Normally, this is where I’d end a toast or letter but—I don’t want
to be exhausted by history. So I push away tales of past kin, become
a predator pretending not to be prey. I make a right down a path and
a lane of hazel rabbits decorate the grass. Born free yet heavy, they
lay on their bellies—some over each other, others in a plump chorus
line. I’m almost 45 years old and have never laid like that—with my
fur in delight and Botticellian repose. How do these rabbits sleep
with Mercury in retrograde? Like me, do they dream in threes?
What I really want to know is - can they tell what I am by what
I fear and what I eat?
Added: Friday, September 13, 2024 / Used with permission. This poem originally appeared in Cynthia Manick's chaplet "Brown Girl Polaris" (Belladonna Chaplet Series #327).
Photo by Sue Rissberger.
Cynthia Manick is the author of No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad-HarperCollins, 2023), which received 5 stars from Roxane Gay and was selected as a New York Public Library Best Book. She is the author of Brown Girl Polaris (a Belladonna chaplet), editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, and winner of the Lascaux Prize in Collected Poetry for her first collection Blue Hallelujahs. For 10 years she curated Soul Sister Revue, a quarterly reading series that featured emerging poets, poet laureates, and Pulitzer Prize winners. Manick’s work can be found in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She lives in New York but travels widely for poetry.
Image Description: Cynthia Manick stands in a lit archway. She's an African-American woman with black shoulder length braids. The braids are swept to the side and rest on her left shoulder. She is wearing a black v-neck shirt and a loose blue cardigan.
