This Worn Body

Originally published on Black Feminist Collective’s platform.

What do I tell you
when your walls are my only echo?
What part of me do I expose
when your gaze will not claim me?
What voids do I uninhabit
when our skin becomes the veil
that hides your indifference
to my differences?

How do I unsilence the rage
that drowns in this body,
when you cower at what it holds?
How am I still here,
reminding you, reminding myself,
this dissident flesh should not bend
to your fear or mine?
How can it say, ‘race first’?
For what race can it be
when you have yet to recognize it
as fully human?

It only knows a love that haunts my soul
until it empties my eyes,
a justice that demands my voice
but bullies me into self-sacrifice.
No matter how generous my hands,
I only know to hide from myself.
This bleeding is not new,
but it stings the same,
like a girl demanding life,
like a woman on the brink of hers.
And I’ve had enough!

Enough with the rooms plagued
by the eerie silence of others’ stories!
I will no longer be made small inside them.
I want no more emptiness in my shoes
nor songs from this land.
Give me what’s mine!
Give me the abysm, the ocean,
and the trembling trail they leave behind.
For if I do not write its shadow,
I will become her…and quiver.

Or perhaps words will never suffice
to stitch the crack in my chest
in search of a way home.

I only know death –
slow, deliberate,
at my hands
and others’,
its voice a mere whisper
of bare tears.

And I’ve had enough…
But no tool can repair
these shattered bones
or build a piece of cloud
where this worn body can rest.