Flesh of Mine

My body is a ship strung

between the blades of a propeller.

It’s 4:10 a.m.

I contract life until the curve of my stomach

is welded into a world where Black men

are born with bullets in their backs.

It took us 26 minutes to leave me a pulped wreck.

6 pounds 7 ounces and you don’t cry.

I look for you,

watch you uncrease like the bends in my knees.

You yell at the doctor, a short growl

and I know that you are just like me

with a tongue too sharp to fragment words.

Your brown eyes droning the room.

My skin still hot from labor, pushing

heat into your pores,

our heartbeats drilled together by our breath.

You are as still as kisses I type onto your forehead

and I know that this is the only love

that will ever matter to me again.

Son, I’m sorry for being selfish.

For squeezing you into a life that I don’t recognize.

But I need you to know that ya mama

ain’t never been weak.

I am an armada.

Endless sails snipped from horizon,

swimming sky to sea,

buried beneath blue burdens bouldered on my bows.

I bellow boldly.

Never needed a man

except to conceive.

A woman too loyal to notice the holes in my stern.

I soulmated the plank.

My masts married to holding the world up for everyone else,

iron rusting from my hair follicles, leaving behind corroded

pieces of the me we used to love.

I lost sensation.

But mommy’s woke now.

And it didn’t take the deaths of 300 men to align my fleet

or to force me to grow gills.

Just your love to unbind anchors from my tear ducts

and a wake-up call: Poseidon’s Batman symbol,

Calypso’s Davy Jones to keep my tunnel vision straight.

iii

Stink J.,

I will sewage nations for you,

seaweed the souls of every adult and child if I have to.

I will never let your horizon cut itself like mine did.

Won’t stand by and watch you sand into the ocean

until you don’t know yourself.

Will never leave you without a battleship or protection.

Can’t let your back oxidize under the pressure of being Black in America.

Mommy will grow your gills for you

so you will never have to feel your lungs backfire

cannons into your chest.

Notes:

This piece is included in Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School, edited by Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, Peter Kahn, and Dan Sullivan. Published by Penguin Workshop. All poems are copyright of their respective authors.

Source: Poetry (December 2021)