after
by Safia Elhillo
after Danez Smith, with a line by Ol’ Dirty Bastard
if you read this in red maybe i didn’t
survive every day i go missing one
eyelash at a time or sometimes all
at once & in the heaven for
blackgirls gone away we walk in
& out of rivers & wear our good silks
our good brown velvet bodies dripping
with sunlight we sprout leaves & no one
decides for us to cut or keep them we
bear fruit & self-sustain we tread water we
pluck the moon for our hair & another grows
in its place we are sistered or unsistered
but never again to a dead thing somewhere
a rope turns & turns & our feet never touch
the ground somewhere a song playes
& plays & names us with each touch of a needle to our
round black surfaces
i’m hanging out /partying/with girls/that never die
Sudanese by way of Washington, D.C., Safia Elhillo is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation, and Crescendo Literary and The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator.
From the new anthology: Women of Resistance: Poems For A New Feminism, Edited by Danielle Barnhart & Iris Mahan
https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/women-of-resistance/
“Here we have 49 women and men and queers and inter-sexuals throwing their everything at this moment in time when the patriarch is really shaking, and it looks like he’s about to tumble down. We’ve got this shiny new book. People are scared that nothing will be left after he falls except a bunch of poems. Pick up this glowing book as you’re crawling through the rubble, and poem by poem and page by page you’ll begin to know that you’ll be okay. You’re in there, and so are your friends. You won’t starve, you’re safe and strong thanks to all these proud, funny, violent, trembling words. Start memorizing. Cause the future is here and this stuff is true.” —Eileen Myles
