AUDRE LORDE AND I TAKE A GOLDEN SHOVEL AND DIG OURSELVES OUT OF OUR EARLY GRAVES

In the dream world a world printed on the pages of My

Journal a brilliant black Hand

Sparkles held out to me and when I grab it in Comes

A whole procession of glowing black women Down

The staircase of my decaying house Like

My first black mothers something like A

Family something like a history of Brown

Women raising me something like a Vise

Grip choking out the snakes in the grass that used to crawl Over

Me but now they make strange gurgling sounds The

Air leaving their lungs their corpses left on the Marigolds

To rot / the whitecishet canon is dead and I’m Reckless-

-Ly brown-skinned in the world / Through

The transition of power what’s left of the white hegemony is in Despair

But Audre Lorde and I look at each other and grin We

Love to see the world glistening our teeth Were

Ice cubes before and are now pearls shining in our mouths / Two

Years ago every day for six weeks was tears and Black

Post-it notes taped to the wall making a box of darkness Women

Were a foreign concept certainly black ones too and Touching

Them was the forbidden fruit but yesterday Eve came down to bless Our

New world and said actually Adam was made from us we were the spark

the Flame