Bridge of my mothers, I am
not the same as when I arrived.
How many have come
across the Atlantic
to find you?
To bury themselves
in your green bush,
relax in your salted gap?
I have buried my body
beneath you—under
your anxious & hungry wave—
your warm saliva
sliding between my thighs
& tickling my neck.
I have laid against you,
remember? I have laid with you,
in the same way
Black bodies have always
laid with you, wanting
to break against you
& cut loose the thread
holding us down to earth.
I wanted to be a new dawn
or womxn or mind. Remember
your many beds? Our soft endings
under split wood & rusted metal?
This poem is from Pangyrus’s poetry collection, What Tells You Ripeness: Black Poets on Nature, Edited by Nikki Wallschlaeger (available in our store).
Image: “Boston Beach” by Nigel Burgher, licensed under CC 2.0.
Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a queer Afro-Latinx activist, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. They are the former Editor-in-Chief of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize, and shortlisted for the 2019 Julie Suk Award. They have been awarded fellowships and residencies from Tin House, Lambda Literary, Jack Jones Literary Arts and the Rights of Return USA, the first fellowship designed exclusively for previously incarcerated artists. Their work is anthologized in The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and When There Are Nine. It has also been featured in Adroit, American Poetry Review, the Cincinnati Review, HuffPost, F(r)iction, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, Slate, Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, VIDA Review and others. Hicks received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada University. www.FaylitaHicks.com
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