zora neale hurston

06Feb10

ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. for some they come in with the tide. for others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by time. that is the life of men.

now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. the dream is the truth. then they act and do things accordingly.

~their eyes were watching god.

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she reminds me of you.

04Feb10

although zadie initially rebuked her connection to zora, zadie eventually uttered “she is my sister and i love her.”¹

unlike zadie, you were always my sister and i loved you beyond the dense countenances that attempted to push against time. the black earl grey would often dance between our words that conjured harmonious futures through birthed brown children. you were my sister. there were no spaces between us that compartmentalized a voice or emotion into silence, because we pushed the world into the periphery, breathed, and took off semblances of knowing, when we did not know.

our collective passions were relentless, as we led each other into eternal obscurities. every shared moment had a palette of an organic vanilla. you felt my numerous pains when words could not form and tears hit concrete, because the world never sufficed, for i always sided with audre when she said, “after all isn’t that what we each long for; a sister who we respect without suspicion who says yes, i see you my sister.”

now, time had elapsed. your foreign face lacked our girlwoomanhood years that once embraced us into a fortified union. i masked the pain with a stoic gaze toward the lukewarm water, that once steamed, bubbled, poured, into teacups. there were no words and i refused to accept the distance between our eyes. you looked different, and i felt different, all the same.

but, i wanted to believe, say, and write to you, through maturation, across diverged lives, that “you are still my sister and i love you.”

¹ Excerpt from Zadie Smith’s “On Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does Soulful Mean?,” in her newly published book “Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays.”

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orchid.

03Feb10

orchid. delicate. 65 degrees. adequate lighting. i wanted to contain, protect, harvest, you, away from the world. conception began when rays penetrated your soul through untainted glass, meeting soil with seeds. green naive growth. the stem grew. newborn buds contained warmth, nakedness, proximity. they moved toward an unknown space. sunlight. the bent stem formed a haphazard arch. we blossomed at the pinnacle. opened with a centered purple and marginal white. our duality hung above the earth.defied gravity through faith. we were potted. roots began to puncture the ceramic holder. circles formed to wrap themselves around themselves and kiss atmospheric particles. we moved closer. held each other strong. remained firm. we were harmonious in spring.

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spaces.

03Feb10

you created spaces. crushed them in between fingers. pushed them into dark corners. you left spaces. devoured the unknown. feasted upon voids. you owned spaces. dismantled the collective. shattered formed balance. you sold spaces.

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dense.

28Jan10

dense were the constructed reveries that led me to imagine you underground in red, green, and orange tunnels. charles river. dense. we walked on sunlight. meditated on proximity. embraced through berklee. dense. created new corners in colonized territories. plastered the city purple. dense. luminescent moons orbited around the theoretical us. dense. us, a newborn’s soft spot, bruised by forceps. dense. twenty-four hours. dense. labor pain. dense. delivered.

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grown.

23Jan10

anger ran through me, sharp, piercing and sudden, like you did during the transition of fall. you plowed, fertilized, tilled your soil, attempting to bring it back to life. this soil was lifeless, barren, brown, and confused as to why there was an intruder, a gardener, an intruder. who opened the steel gate for you/who let you in/why did you not read ‘no trespassing’/well come on in/you aren’t a guest/you’ve been here before/. my purple brown body lied down, dead, looking up at the ceiling that held glow in the dark stars, marking childhood, as this moment was supposed to make me more than a child. i was now a grown woman. grown like the women whose wide hips and legs spread. grown like the woman whose lips circled around red plumbs. grown like the women whose conversations you could not enter. grown like the women who would open/shut doors to men at night. grown like the women who carried pain when they entered new spaces and new rooms. just grown. this gardening now provided a rite of passage to weave through, stand in, connect to and merge with voices who embarked upon this journey that made them womanly. yet, i meandered, not knowing my place, as my body did not feel womanly, nor did my voice, because this garden had been used to comfort you from the snow that would soon fall and bury the outside autumn leaves. so these diminishing kisses forced my spirit to leave my body and watch your thrusting movements that compelled me to hate, compelled me to suppress, compelled me to not want to do this all over again, because i no longer cared about being grown. me, numb, drowning in white wine. you, gardener, exploding, seeds everywhere. i bathed. washed. scrubbed my body, to smooth over your attempted fertilization with soil and soap. clothes on. stars remain. hymen broken. call me a child. call me grown. i straddled in between. i did not care that my hips were now wide and my legs now spread. i did not care that my lips had circled around a red plumb. i did not care that i could now enter coversations that once prohibited me. i did not care that i had open/shut doors to men at night. i now carried you, and pain in new spaces and new rooms. just grown.

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