FAMILY PORTRAIT Poem by Safiya Sinclair

At our table we don't say grace.
We sit silent in the face of our questions,
a crown of mosquitos swarming our heads.

In this picture, some hot day in March,
the sun makes a strange halo around my ear,
light exploding in our dining room window.

Outside, the mongrels whine against our door,
two pups forbidden shelter for their impurity,
my weak heart dividing to offer all its scraps.

But what could I offer them, when I knew nothing
of love, and took my corrections with the belt
every evening? There in that city of exile, cobbled

square of salt-rust and rebellion, my father's face looms
its last obstruction, where the dark folds of bougainvillea
remain unclimbing; the one clipped flower

of my objection. That withering bloom still hangs limply
in its tangled brooch; my dress, my hands, bruised and falling
loosely about my thighs, unable to ask for a single thing.

And perhaps it was only the rain howling in my ear,
as I observe my doppelgänger in the shadows of the frame,
setting fire to the curtains while we slept. Poisoning

whatever dark potion fills my father's cup, my mother
at his shoulder with her fixed pitcher, pouring. She was
pregnant then, and still wore the mouth of her youth,

so quiet and unsure of itself, her fingers' twelve points
streaked across the jug's fogged glass. There I am again.
I am not myself - long before I shed my Medusa hair,

before anyone caught my sister eating black bits
of a millipede, shell and yellow fur snagged in her teeth,
I had my crooked guilt. My brother with his dagger

at my throat. This is us. This is all of us.
Before we knew this life would shatter, moving wild
and unwanted through the dark and the light.