Safiya Sinclair

This is where you leave me. Filling of old salt and ponderous, what’s left of your voice in the air. Blue honeycreeper thrashed out to a ragged wind, whole months spent crawling this white beach raked like a thumb, shucking, swallowing the sea’s benediction, pearled oxides. Out here I am the body invented naked, woman emerging from cold seas, herself the raw eel-froth met beneath her tangles, who must believe with all her puckering holes. What wounds the Poinciana slits forth, what must turn red eventually. The talon-mouths undressing. The cling-cling bird scratching its one message; the arm you broke reset and broke again. Caribbean. Sky a wound I am licking, until I am drawn new as a lamb, helpless in the chicken wire of my sex. I let every stranger in. Watch men change faces with the run-down sun, count fires in the loom-holes of their pickups, lines of rot, studying their scarred window-plagues, nightshade my own throat closed tight against a hard hand. Then all comes mute in my glittering eye. All is knocked back, slick hem-suck of the dark surf, ceramic tiles approaching, the blur of a beard. The white tusk of his ocean goring me. This world unforgiving in its boundaries. The day’s owl and its omen slipping a bright hook into my cheek —

The meek inherit nothing. God in his tattered coat this morning, a quiet tongue in my ear, begging for alms, cold hands reaching up my skirt. Little lamb, paupered flock, bless my black tea with tears. I have shorn your golden fleece, worn vast spools of white lace, glittering jacquard, gilded fig leaves, jeweled dust on my skin. Cornsilk hair in my hems. I have milked the stout beast of what you call America; and wear your men across my chest like furs. Stickpin fox and snow blue chinchilla: they too came to nibble at my door, the soft pink tangles I trap them in. Dear watchers in the shadows, dear thick-thighed fiends. At ease, please. Tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes — I have nothing to hide. I will spread myself wide. Here, a flash of muscle. Here, some blood in the hunt. Now the center of the world: my incandescent cunt. All hail the dark blooms of amaryllis and the wild pink Damascus, my sweet Aphrodite unfolding in the kink. All hail hot jasmine in the night; thick syrup in your mouth, forked dagger on my tongue. Legions at my heel. Here at the world’s red mecca, kneel. Here Eden, here Bethlehem, here in the cradle of Thebes, a towering sphinx roams the garden, her wet dawn devouring.

The mind’s black kettle hisses its wild exigencies at every turn: The hour before the coffee and the hour after. Penscratch of the gone morning, woman a pitched hysteria watching the mad-ant scramble, her small wants devouring. Her binge and skin-thrall. Her old selves being shuffled off into labyrinths, this birdless sky a longing. Her moth-mouth rabble unfacing touch-and-go months under winter, torn letters under floorboards, each fickle moon pecked through with doubt. And one spoiled onion. Pale Cyclops on her kitchen counter now sprouting green missives, some act of contrition; neighbor-god’s vacuum a loud rule thrown down. Her mother now on the line saying too much. This island is not a martyr. You tinker too much with each gaunt memory, your youth and its unweeding. Not everything blooms here a private history — consider this immutable. Consider our galloping sun, its life. Your starved homesickness. The paper wasp kingdom you set fire to, watched for days until it burnt a city in you. Until a family your hands could not save became the hurricane. How love is still unrooting you. And how to grow a new body — to let each word be the wild rain swallowed pure like an antidote. Her mother at the airport saying don’t come back. Love your landlocked city. Money. Buy a coat. And even exile can be glamorous. Some nights she calls across the deaf ocean to no one in particular. No answer. Her heart’s double-vault a muted hydra. This hour a purge of  its own unselfing. She must make a home of it.