Refusing Eurydice

Someone tells me the earth and everything in it

will belong to me if I catch the horizon before sundown.

I sprint, kicking up dust all the while.

It seems I run with everyone in the world

standing on my kidneys, eating my head.

What’s that for? I ask.

I know how to eat my head.

The more I run, the more I feel

like a burned bit of rice fallen by the stove.

Someone is using my braids as bridle and whip.

It seems I’ll run until my womb falls out of my body.

I look down a few times.

I run until sundown, and a bell sounds

from the four corners of earth.

I hum a workingwoman blues

and lie down with my eyes beating.

I sink into the ground,

down past stone and metal and water and fire.

Am I dead? I ask.

I slept so long, I went back to the place

souls wait for their forms.

In the schoolyard of my youth,

a peer and an elder tried to exorcise a shadow spirit.

They held me under my arms.

I was puking sludge and nightmaring ex-lovers,

sliding out the trash like chicken bones.

“There’s still some shadow inside her,” they said

and went away shaking their heads.

I went home. I tried to jump out the window.

I wanted to jump but didn’t have anyone’s name to scream.

I didn’t ask God for a hug this time.

It was warm. I wanted to walk the streets naked

but didn’t think I’d be left in peace.

Am I dead?

I keep saying:

I don’t have to do shit but stay black and die!

Is dead what I’m doing? I was pretending ready.

I was breastfed only two months.

I have a poor memory of the sea

and am obsessed with water.

When pregnant,

my mother ate too much fish,

and sweet cakes and milk,

and cried on the beach.

My father said everything he ate had sand in it.

Halfway through a meal,

he’d find grains in the meat, in the salt,

on his glasses, which he’d take off

and rinse in water to avoid scratching them.

My mother’s mother is buried in a dry land.

Her ghost would tire walking to the ocean.

Her grave is marked with a bowl of water and a succulent.

Her daughters pledged to build her a well,

and lay green carpets in a holy house.

I promised my mother I’d write a poem about ablutions.

I haven’t done it because I don’t know

which part needs washing first.

Am I dead?

There are bodies all around me.

A swarm of files takes custody of the pile of corpses.

Get up, an African witch from Atlanta says.

There is no Hades. You don’t get to choose death.

You’re an immigrant, not a refugee.

You’ve flown to and fro over the ocean in peace since birth.

There are many who look like you––down, in the water,

down, where Solomon’s jinns found gems, and deeper.

They’ve murmured in the sludge and oil of primordial time,

throwing up pearls and other stones.

Thrive, says an African witch from Atlanta.

I rise, my mind looming with fly-song.

Go to your sisters, the witch says.

I rouse two women. We walk in a huddle,

covering each other with our funk.

We bleed freely and eat,

inhale a metallic scent from our temples,

from behind our knees, and higher up our legs.

We eat near men who are fasting.

The men’s eyes and lungs suck the scent

of the flesh we women carry, the flesh we eat.

Fruit flies circle our plates, our waists.

The witch lights incense and smokes our hair,

the white linen we wear faceup in the grass,

watching billow topped by billow,

our hems blowing around our knees.

Once rested, the witch demands a spell for flourishing:

Recite reason to live, she says.

Though your tongue makes errors,

say yea or say yeah,

and it is still devotion.

My sisters exhale light, a mist.

I start with my origins:

I am Ladan,

who knows her mother,

and her mother’s mothers

twenty generations back.

I am a lion born in a house of fire.

I am a Leo born to a woman with burned forearms.

I am not permitted to ask her how she got them.

I tell myself she bore them delivering me.

I am Ladan, whom my father wanted to name after a holy well.

My mother insisted they call me well-being instead.

I have been asleep a long time.

I was playing patty-cake with my shadow,

and others’ shadows for too long.

I died chasing the horizon, and got up anyway.

I am here to inherit the earth and everything in it.

I want what every being has a right to,

and then more than that.

I possess one compass, which is my soul,

and it shall never err.

My my voice penetrate

as a steed in battle penetrates an enemy mass.

I have restored myself

and am searching for a green man,

a man who lays leaves as he walks.

I have recovered myself

and am looking for my unborn child,

whom witches ask me to greet.

The green man will approach your kingdom

in writing, the witch says.

Do not be ashamed to test men.

The green one will warm your flesh in his palms,

then lick you from behind

until you find your own water under your feet.

Now go tell your troubles to a tree.

I scream grievances at an acacia until it’s damp / I’m parched.

I leave my sisters and go to a good man,

the wings of a pregnant housefly beating my eyelashes.

I oil my palms and rub his brown to bark.

They took me to a forest floor

of broken mouths, I tell him.

They took me to an alley

flooded with drool, he tells me.

I watched my words fall into a well, I say.

The Word flew, birds rendered

off the edge of composition, he says.

I ask him to show me a hill of black children in repose.

To loom me fine linen.

I’m hard as a tree, he says. You flood my sod.

Yes, I say. You’re so hard, and I take it and make it look easy.

I have been low. I am on high.

Record my relief.

Let us wade in our water.

We walk, asleep, exhaling pollen.

We go to the place between dreams.

It’s buttressed by ancestors

who tell us they’re proud.

They interrupt our waking motions

to remind us they’re proud.

Let us go to the place between dreams.

If you’re too worried about women

running shoeless away from whatever

or whoever pursues them,

ready to slam a door on their ankles,

go to the place between dreams,

where no woman has to run with a broken ankle

and a heart that’s a blade in a washer,

tumbling on and bleeding into a stomach

that receives this blood as acid.

Go to the place between dreams,

where your flank shimmers in the moonlight

or a streetlight of your pleasure.

I am not a woman who has had to run with a broken ankle.

Praise God and praise the feet that meet steps

and cracks with confidence.

Go to the place between dreams, where all the light is yours.

Even if it looks like headlights or streetlights or floodlights

held by whatever or whoever pursues you,

the light is yours. Even if it has to drag you at first,

hold it against your beating stomach and gurgling heart.

Go to the place between dreams,

where a woman’s mild voice looms.

She offers instruction you can’t yet hear.

Follow her. She has never run with a broken ankle,

or with her thigh shimmering in any light not her own.

Go to the place between dreams.

The building and grounds

are covered by forms pacing

or reclining or sitting.

Enter a marble room.

It’s full of steam. It’s filled with forms.

Each is naked.

Some are covered in fine hair.

Some shaved everything except a patch behind their knees

or just under their tailbones.

There is no hesitation. There is no imperfection.

Sit and imagine the pleasure of sitting in your own lap,

your daughter sitting in your lap.

Sitting between your aged mother’s legs,

with your daughter in your lap.

Lie on hot marble chestfirst.

Listen to voices murmur and echo.

You’re inside your heart.

Listen to your sighing.

You didn’t know your voice was so musical,

why it pleased the ones who love you,

repulsed the ones confused by you.

Feel your voice on top of your teeth,

vibrating in the spit on top of and between your teeth.

Let your voice be food.

Let it line your gums where they meet your cheeks.

Let its particles linger at the back of your tongue,

a muscular member, that thing capable

of true penetration, soft but never flaccid.

May your thoughts be muscular, too.

May you make so many things,

your tendons pulse, aching for work.

On earth, they worked women so hard,

their wombs fell out while walking.

Remember this lying bellyfirst on hot marble.

Bless their wombs.

Bless the womb fallen from a woman who had to keep walking.

Lie on hot marble flankfirst.

You carried the pain of your humiliated mother

on the outer curve of each shoulder blade.

Leave all of that hallway and stairway and bathtub moaning

here on this hot marble. It cannot reenter

in defiance of your illuminated flank.

Finger the scar that runs dark from bellybutton to clitoris.

Remember you are not a woman who was cut.

Remember your mother said: Not my daughters

and the elder women said: Okay.

You do not fear any examination or detention or operation.

Obviously God has removed some thing from you,

and waits for you to go to the place past dreaming

so you can ask. The address you are seeking

is the place past dreaming, and when you go there,

God will return the flesh or dimness

removed so you can be birthed into the place

where you are now, lying flankfirst

and fingering your flesh with all your faculties intact.

This is a congregation refusing Eurydice.

We refuse death by spells.

We refuse death by attack.

We refuse death by falling,

and we refuse death in depressions.

We refuse the spirits that attempt oppression,

and we refuse the spirits that attempt possession.

We refuse humans who call themselves gods,

who try to graft hellfire onto our bodies,

and raise columns of fire in our yards.

We are looking for better myths.

We are tired of falling

and finding ourselves underfoot.

We are searching the earth

for images that draw parables.

We left the serpents underfoot in peace

and refuse their bites.

We refuse death by discourse.

We refuse death by exile.

We refuse death by falling,

and we refuse death in depressions.

We are looking for a better myth.

We’ve only been looking since Eve.