Safiya Sinclair Poems

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 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.
...

White is a state of mind. Spangled. Blinding,
Shining sky awash in all its shining. White arms
Spread wide claimed she was friendly, cried she was
Mighty, then tracked her mud across my shore,
Gilded lamp lifting to hawk a fantasy. Eyes torched
Dark with snake-oil, heeled vision burnt in blood,
In blood ransacked what hungered me, then built
A fence that voids me still. Mother, illegal, Mother-in-exile,
Spurned unworthy, told "Go back to your country," Mother
Still yearning to breathe. Free. Been tired, been poor,
Been wretched, barricaded, huddled mass 'cross stolen
Centuries, undocumenting liberty. Goodbye to all of that.
World-born-wrong, how freedom preens red-throated
From your jail. Here lies her empty. Here lies her brass
Corona, her rusted. Colossus drowned under artless seas.
I, too, will miss America.
...

Only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.

—W. B. Yeats, "For Anne Gregory"



Sister, there was nothing left for us.
Down here, this cast-off hour, we listened
but heard no voices in the shells. No beauty.

Our lives already tangled in the violence of our hair,
we learned to feel unwanted in the sea's blue gaze,
knowing even the blond lichen was considered lovely.

Not us, who combed and tamed ourselves at dawn,
cursing every brute animal in its windy mane—
God forbid all that good hair being grown to waste.

Barber, I can say a true thing or I can say nothing;
meet you in the canerows with my crooked English,
coins with strange faces stamped deep inside my palm,

ask to be remodeled with castaway hair, or dragged
by my scalp through your hot comb. The mirror takes
and the mirror takes. I've waded there and waited in vanity;

paid the toll to watch my wayward roots foam white,
drugstore formaldehyde burning through my skin.
For good hair I'd do anything. Pay the price of dignity,

send virgins in India to daily harvest; their miles
of glittering hair sold for thousands in the street.
Still we come to them yearly with our copper coins,

whole nights spent on our knees, our prayers whispered
ear to ear, hoping to wake with soft unfurling curls,
black waves parting strands of honey.

But how were we to know our poverty?
That our mother's good genes would only come to weeds,
that I would squander all her mulatta luck.

This nigger-hair my biggest malady.
So thick it holds a pencil up.
...

February, I am an open wound—woman discarded
and woman emerging. Scars devising scars.
To live here we know precisely how to be haunted.
Sundown sun, a sterile sky come running,
sweet gallow-grass whistling; Ghosts.
All year we learn that chainsaw hymnal, outside the Lawn,
another excavation—slave quarters found concealed
in the student dorms; buried rooms choked, sounds
bricked off. Two centuries' thorns may break sudden bloom.
What can we say? No one speaks of it. I dream pristine.
And skirting the caution-tape instead, we clasp hands
with each other in complicity.

Somewhere, the ghost-arm of history
still throttling me. This taste of old blood on the wind,
the crouched statue of Sacajawea shrouded behind the pioneers.
Creature of unbelonging, unname a new silence.
Magnolia explosion, its Leviathan shade.
Then fall, what sick messiah. Fall, I am coughing in
the aisles again, where bare triage of voices pour molasses in
my ear. Where a bald insurrection of tongues. Then
squashed rebellion, scrutiny. Indoctrination.
To live here we know precisely how to be hunted.
...

They could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man.
—James Baldwin

Nature, we have spent our many lives
undressing

our scowl colossal, half-light
stripped from eye and sockets,
that song bojangling, unrecognizable.

Home some brute sojourn
we wracked unspeakable, we mute vernacular
smashed nuclear sun and this code-switch.

All night the world bled on my fang
like a language and we unsmiling
our narrow gape
our space unslanging,

And all of us a zero.
Count old catalogues of bone, hair, teeth:

How broad how thick how beastly
and you the glass beaker of seeds
who gauge minute fractions of man, am I Orang-utan

Or am I savage? Neighbour,
I am naming you damned.
Blood brother, trained guerilla, renegade.
Killer. Threat of the Africanized bee.

Are we unsymmetry, skulls a million unfillable,
this dark uranium. With life half-cycling.

The parched chopper circling.
Cowed mammoth in the weeds.

Tag skin, brain, misdemeanour.
What was left to inherit?

Another spotlight
Nation, we are silencing
our many voice rehearsing

your shadow plays; a knock,
a hard knock, an illiterate dream;
O snuffed singularity—

How bright the searchlight
of our homecoming: black comet
sprawling past black infinity, black heavens.
Black grenade.
...

Our body antipodes. Brilliant lung and ten
good bones, crochet-neck umbilical, myself the yarn.
She carries her hands her hair around like ghosts,
my nocturne-unfamiliar, coiled interruptus
gooseflesh clouding our display case. Already twice myself
the noose.
No one has shattered that errant tooth, not even you.
The ocean sucks its salt appendage through my empty.
Already I have been a miracle, emerging
Still tending its incestuous wound.
And there goes our little world, set upon its haunches,
fraught with neglect—
Sister, we must eat.
Even the glittering oracle
of the bird-catcher spider offers nothing but the bones of bones.
Your carnivore unheaded what stalks our puncturing
what marks the mouth bewails its spaces, pines
for permission
to flush or anther.

Night prowls dangerous heavy.
Exhume a neon city. Our moon gone fat
With such astounding matter.
This feast parasitic.

Five days I watch its slow work with envy cough up
beak and penumbra. While our one mind hardens its
grief homicidal
till what inverts this lonesome dark I call thrall, luciferous.
Mine only.
...

Sunset. That blood-orange hymn
combusting the year, nautilus chamber

of youth's obscurities, your empty room
for psalms, lost rituals. There find the bittersweetness

of one's unknown body, heliotropic;
Welcome, stranger of myself.

Consider the Jumbie bird clanging its deathshriek
like a gong, shooting through our mapless season,

unnaming the home you're always leaving,
scattering the names we have lost again.

The heart and its bombshell
bespeak the hurricane—

what has drowned, has drowned.
She will not return. The headless sky

unseals and aches for us, mother and sister
caught upon the steel hook of its memory.

Wet mouth of my future body, we've come to understand
each word, and how sometimes the words

themselves will do. Obeah-man, augured island,
I am called to remember the burning palm

and the broad refuge of the poinciana tree.
Dear Family, how willingly I pushed my feet

into the hot coals of your lamentation.
Jamaica, if I wear your lunacy like a dark skin,

or lock this day away in the voodoo-garden
of our parting, know that I still mimic your wails,

knee-deep in beach, know I am gouging the stars
for any trace of ghost. For the algorithm

of uncertain history. The simple language
of our cannibal sea. If, Grandfather,

your wandering fishermen still recast
their lives down on the disappearing shore,

know I too am scorching there.
Igniting and devouring

each abducted day.
...

After W. E. B. Du Bois


Wild irises purpling my mouth each dawning—
trauma souring the quiet street.
Its whole dark field roots me down and down. The mock-sun a blank obscuring. Fire whips
white-shock of lightning, bright Molotov angel, what ash marks assume a coon cemetery.

And all the names scratched out.
What burns this house burns apishly.
The mouth the church this immaculate body,
such untouchable sounds we have made of ourselves. A blues archeology. Thus like a snake
I writhe upward, mottling and spine-thick, where heavy nouns flay through my tubercular,

their heavens coil a twisted rope. Your veiled suffocation.
Unknown asphyxiate. The mourning dove which scales
its double gaze in tongues knows this: the broken world
was always broken.

How does it feel to be a problem? The mute centuries shatter in my ear.
The aimed black spear. This body, a crisis.
A riot. A racket. The whole world whistling.

Harass me a savage state, vast hectares will tar this noon infertile, each day a prisonhouse,
my sickbed
caulking each bloom a bruise.
Quick hands swathe me in miles of cotton. Now blood-stained sheets in my room.

There is an old woman who is not my grandmother.
There is an old sadness I was born to wear like a dress.
She feeds me condensed milk through a bird-feeder
and smiles,
says don't pay attention to the flies in my eyes.
...

She daily effuses
the close-mouthed
tantrum of her fevers.

Hog-tied and lunatic.
Born toothsome,
unholy. Born uppity.

Blue-jawed and out-order.
Watched her sculptor
split her bitter seam

with his scalding knife;
mauled through the errant
flesh of her nature

and hemorrhaged mercury,
molted snakeroot, a smoke
of weeping silver.

She, accused.
Sprung from the head
of a thousand-fisted

wretch or a blood-dark
cosmos undoubling
her bound body.

Vexed shrew. Blight of moon.
She, armory. Pitched-milk pours
from her gold oracular.

Bred in her nest a lone
grenade, prized, unpried
its force-ripe wound.

She, disease. Often bruised
to brush the joy of anything.
Zombic. Un-groomed.

Her night slinks open
its sliding pin. One by one
these loose hopes

harpoon themselves
in, small-ghosts alighting
at her unwhoring.

She, infirmary.
God's swallowed
lantern, tar-hair and thick.

Her black torchstruck.
A kindling stick.
No sinkle-bible fix

to cure this burning.
Shrill hell. Jezebel.

Isn't it lonely.
...