we get a full view and when the clouds is below you
you can dream of heaven on earth
the crone got all silver teeth and she use mud to make her home
the pretty red dirt is her makeup
and her chewing gum
the mud got so hot it became ceramic
and endured for civilizations
underground, lingering earthly lifetimes
Olmec heads are proof
that we crossed oceans and we built and we remained
and embedded under every new civilization
is an earth that never forgets
AFUA
DISAPPEARING ACT
Sakeem disappeared while being injected. Entirely faded into space as the serum united with his blood. It was through the walls, whispers, and kites that this news spread. That he got more transparent until all that was left was the navy-blue attire issued to him that all of us convicted wear. The way rumors move around prison, it is hard to know what to believe, so you got to believe all of it and none of it, at the same time. It was never confirmed by the two guards I asked, but more importantly it was never denied. Instead there was always a look of curiosity at my question with uncomfortable laughter and then a shake of the head but never an utterance of the word no. They looked like men who heard of a miracle they refused to believe, and thus laughter was their only response. So then I had no choice but to believe it and ask myself, why couldn’t someone just fly away? Remove themselves through magic or fear itself?
After Sakeem’s disappearance, I would lie in my bed and think of all of the layers of life and magic I done experienced in my lifetime. Even the bad stuff, over time had begun to reveal a certain silvery emergence within my soul and a recalling of lessons. And sometimes there was no lesson, just an ambiguous abyss of loss, like in the death of my friend and my own unjust incarceration. Loss, plain and simple.
Ms. Valerie sent me this book about past-life-regression hypnotherapy that up until that time, I never thought to open or read, but Sakeem’s disappearance opened up a channel of my brain that I couldn’t shake off and this book for some reason piqued my interest. I started attempting to do some of the techniques. I would lie in the bed in my chamber and breathe deeply until I could relax myself. I recited the words over and over that were to bring me to a liminal place within my consciousness. I felt kind of foolish at first but I would just keep reciting these words until they were cycling through my head in a loop. One day, I said these words until I found myself perched somewhere high and above this earth. I was where I could see the landscapes and doorways to the lives of my soul. I watched cosmic reels of me journeying through past existences that I had never known of. I felt the tingling of past bodies in my current one.
MABEL
AFUA’S BOOK and my dreams got me thinking hard about ancestors. Afua writes about his past lives all the way back to Africa—sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman. I begin to wonder about if whether this was my first and only life. I have always been a kid people would call an old soul or like my aunt Niiki would say, I been here before, but I don’t know if that means I have actually lived other lifetimes or will live again when I die in this one.
Afua calls going back in the past in order to embrace the present moment through meditation, mantra and hypnosis Sankofa sojourns. He travels and sees himself in a past life and watches it like a movie. One life that he spoke of, I remember in particular. He was a girl-child who was more indigo than night.
I was imprisoned in that life too. All of the women in my family were shamans and sensual healers and I was a warrior in this lineage. Women were powerful within my family and village. One day strangers arrived. They smelled like smoke and their skin was silver and thin. They offended our people by talking to my king grandmother’s husband instead of bowing to her and giving her gifts. These offending men were sent away with machete and breast brandishing. Then that night our village was destroyed in an explosion of bullets as were our temples. They slit my grandmother’s throat as well as her two wife-companions and three husbands. In all of my lifetimes and all of my losses, the loss of this grandmother put the largest break to my soul, I learned in my Sankofa sojourns.
I wish that he was free in this life and could walk in a cool mist of rain and feel it on his face or just be home chilling on the couch, talking shit with family. Stuff I’m going to miss and want to do, no matter where I end up. Even if his concepts or ideas might seem like he is a weirdo or crazy to some people, sometimes the only thing that gives me hope are his thoughts and words. I’m still scared and can’t think about my future very much without it feeling foolish. And at the same time I feel like I can imagine myself being more than an afraid girl dying but a soul that can return again and be a multidimensional being.
I have had different bodies and earthly and otherworldly homes. I see this as a lifetime spent to study stars, meditate, and master myself. How else could I be here? Or is this what I tell myself to try and make sense of the darkness and destruction of spirit that prison has been to me? I guess I’m never really sure. I do know that I’m here and that I have been before and I will be again.
AQUARIUS SEASON
clay mold of structure and intellectual mastery
holding the wetness of our emotion heavy humanity.
the wisdom of the future
unfolding in multidimensional visions
in woke third eyes.
holding the expanse of emotions
the emotions of seas, the depth of oceans
hold it all
without succumbing
to the heavy of the feelings.
she the old lady sage from other worlds,
the precision of restraint
and the limitlessness of cosmic intuition.
AUDRE
We was fifteen and she was an underground railroad to my hidden self. Freedom, at the end of dark tunnels. When I met Junie in 1957 in my Harlem hood on the stoop of my uncle’s brownstone, we was best friends on the spot. She was the first person who I ever kissed and told “I love you” to and my first real friend in the States when I move up from Port of Spain with my mother. Junie’s father was Dominican and her mother was from Jamaica, but she born in America. In Junie’s love, I learned that loving on a Black girl wasn’t sinning, but something I lived to do, like painting or eating perfectly ripe plums. From when I was a kid, I had always wanted two things: to love on women and paint. Before I even know the words lesbian or bull dyke, I fell in love with my best friend one Harlem summer on a rooftop watching clouds move and make shapes above us.
Junie even as a young woman looked regal and with the cutest dimples. She was salve and rain for me. I never felt like I deserved love, because from young, I knew I loved and desired women and that it was supposed to be a transgression to God, so I had decided not to love at all. But Junie loved me. No one ever tell you that falling in love with another Black girl would allow you to feel like you a part of an ancient and precious secret. When we spoke it was soul to soul. My body felt her stories and poetry, and I would just surround myself in her day after day. To see Junie, this brilliant black star, I couldn’t help but love myself.
When we was eighteen, I started classes in plumbing at tech school, and it seemed like she was avoiding me. Next I heard about her, Junie got married to a Jamaican and moved away to Queens. It was an unexpected shock, to lose love and be betrayed all at the same time. When I tell you I felt like I was dying, I was so heartbroken. It wasn’t easy being a Black lesbian then, or even now and she probably did what she thought she had to do. Yet, somehow at the deep-sea level of my grief, the seed of her love illuminated a desire for life. And a desire for pleasure and knowing my erotic, my bliss. Every woman I have loved has shown me Goddess and devastation and I thank them every day for the lessons and insights in their love.
&nb
sp; —Ena Amethyst-Miel, Black Girls Know How to Love, with Coconut Oil, Along the Cornrow
I copied these words into my notebook. They come from a lesbian Trinidadian-American painter and poet I found to do my project on for Ms. Sharkey’s class. She paintings is like she words, unique and vulnerable and it remind me of Trinidad. I read the words over and over. The words make me feel less lonely, just hearing someone else has experienced a big tabanca. I think of my life and how I seem to find some kind of pain, wherever. Whether it be in my dreams, with my mom, Neri, or Mabel. I feeling love for Mabel and I don’t know how to stop it. All I know about love is how to find its hurt and its endings after I find its sweetness. I touch by my heart and feel my pouch and feel for the hardness of the rocks I find by the creek by my house, the sand from by the beach by Queenie, herbs, and my sacred stones and whisper my affirmations for Mabel’s healing.
Sweetness is here. Kissing at all things. Broken or confused.
You are safe. Universal. Limitless. Sacred. Sensual. Divine. Free.
I breathing and trying to remember Queenie’s lessons and incantations when I feelings so scatter in my spirit. I’m in the corner of Ms. Sharkey’s room, feeling all of these feelings while Prism, the LGBTQIA+ and allies group is meeting like they do every Wednesday after school. Jazzy is in the front of class leading the meeting while everyone is chattering with laughter and ruckus. I is in the corner, trying to ignore everyone and to focus on my prayers and concoctions so I’ll be ready to see Mabel right after the meeting. But I keep getting distracted by a feeling I can’t shake: heavy and weak, stuck and hopeless, like the snow and the ice have taken over my inner world. Nothing feeling like it going right, just stuck in stone and nothingness.
After the meeting, I is helping clean up the room and pack up the snacks. Folks are leaving, and Jazzy is sitting on the couch and finishing writing up the notes from the meeting. Prism’s meeting agenda is on the big white board. Jazzy’s handwriting is big and loopy, each item in another color of the rainbow.
QUEER PROM
POETRY NIGHT
OUR ZINE
END OF THE YEAR TRIP TO ATL
SERVICE LEARNING
JUSTICE FOR MURDERED TRANS WOMAN
PETITION FOR INCLUSIVE LGBTQIA+ SEX. ED
She and I have become pretty cool, especially since we have Ms. Sharkey’s class together. She invited me to lime at the meeting even though I tell she I have schoolwork to do and I is not any of them letters that the group is for. Like Queenie, Jazzy don’t really care what you want to do when she wants you to do something. She said if I stay, she will give me a ride and I can do homework in the corner if it’s boring.
“I’m glad you stayed. You always bouncing home after school or to Mabel’s house—which I totally get, Audre. She goin’ through it and it seems she really trust you,” Jazzy says, as I finish organizing about the room and plop down next to her in the couch corner that is my favorite place to be in Ms. Sharkey’s class. She finishes her note taking and looks at me and smiles.
“How you feeling about the group? I know you ain’t ‘any of the letters’ as you say, but you know anyone back home who is? What is it like for queer folks in Trinidad?” Jazzy asks, and my chest and face start feeling hot and nervous and I is fidgeting with my fingers.
I um and uh and shrug for it seems like forever, but she won’t let it go, so finally I say, “I sure there is people down there who is like that, but I ain’t know . . . I mainly would see my friends from church or I is with my family, so I wouldn’t know,” I say, stumbling out an excuse as I curl up a little bit more in my corner. I wonder if she could see I ain’t comfortable with she questions.
“Hm-mm,” Jazzy says. “I bet you there some fine girls down there. One day you should let me go back home with you. That would be lit. I bet you I find me some queer family down there,” she says, looking wistfully into the constellation of Christmas lights hanging from Ms. Sharkey’s classroom ceiling. “Do you got a special someone in the islands? ’Cause people around here is asking about you . . . ,” Jazzy says in her way that seem like she know something mysterious, whether she actually does or not.
“Asking about me?” Besides Jazzy, Ursa, and Mabel, I ain’t thinkin’ of no one else at that school unless they are a teacher who is affecting my grades. “I ain’t interested, I just here to focus on school and I have my little crew. I ain’t got time anyway,” I say, and leave it at that, only slightly curious.
“All right, playa, all right. So there is a fine cutie at home?”
I don’t know how she make her eyebrow rise like that. “Why there have to be a fine cutie at home? I just doing me.” I try to act cool, adjust my glasses, and sit up a little bit.
“You right, you right. Sometimes you gotta just be Living Single like Khadijah. I feel you. I’ll let the streets know, it’s no nada for you.” She seems finished with the interrogation, but I have a question for her.
She and Ursa been my main sistren here, besides Mabel, since I begin school. I is happy for this moment, with all of the starry Christmas lights twinkling around we. I like talking to Jazzy, and the room is deserted except for us.
“So, is you and Ursa something?”
Jazzy starts giggling and smiling really big the moment the question slip out my mouth. “Are Ursa and I something? I would say yeah, but we can’t really be all out there with it, even at school ’cause she is concerned it could get back to her family, since her auntie work here. She is the youngest, and she don’t know how her mama would feel or even her siblings. Her mom is really sweet though, and she don’t know we a thing and I’m okay with that . . .” She pauses for a moment. “I guess, ’cause Ursa is my heart no matter what anyone else knows or thinks. Ursa said that she don’t even know if her mom knows what being queer is, which I doubt.” For the first time, I see Jazzy not seem so sure of she self, which I could relate to.
“How about your family? Do they care that you is a lesbian?” The word lesbian feels new in my mouth.
“I think they over it now. I came out when I was in eighth grade. My dad ain’t really care too much, actually. My auntie who raised him is a big ol’ dyke and they real tight. My mom at first thought I didn’t know how I really felt and was doing it to be cool—like I ain’t already dope.” She laughs at the notion. “So, me and my smart mouth asked her if Auntie Alexis was just trying to be cool for the last forty years? I was really hurt she would even say that, Audre, you know? Like I’m simple. And I know she wouldn’t have said that if I said I was liking some boy, so, why is liking girls a phase?” she asks me and no one in particular, and I feel she was right. I ain’t never hear she tell me about she self in this way and I appreciated her openness. Then she starts to giggle again.
“And then WHY my first girlfriend had to be this FINE senior, when I was a sophomore?” I love how Jazzy say she thoughts like a question. “I had been liking Charmaine since I was in ninth grade and we was in Journalism together. Whooo and my mama wasn’t ready for that, but I wasn’t gonna lie since me and my mama is tight. For a while, she kept acting like Charmaine had ‘seduced me,’ which I had to let her know, it wasn’t like that.” She pulls out a pic and starts fluffing her hair wider.
“I get dudes hollering at me all the time, like I owe them my attention and body, but Charmaine wasn’t even like that. She was so sweet and shy, she played ball, was tall and everything.” Jazzy trailed away, giddy in even remembering Charmaine.
“How did y’all connect?” I is hoping she feel to share more, wondering how girls talk to other girls when it’s not an underground church love.
“Oh, I was the one who hollered at her after one of her games. I was, like, ‘What up, shawty?’ I was so thirsty. I asked her if I could take her out for ice cream one day when she was free. I don’t even think she knew it was a date. At first, she wasn’t trying to talk to me ’cause I was younger, or what
ever, but she got over it. It ended when she went away to school. She plays college ball and we still cool.” She’s quiet for a moment and then I see she eyes notice the clock behind my head.
“Let’s get up out of here, girl, so I can bring you to Mabel’s,” she say, and we pack up all of our things, close up the classroom, and head to Jazzy’s car.
We is sitting in she light-blue hatchback around the block from school, waiting for it to warm up. Winter. First it was very whimsical and fun, but now it feeling cold and dark and make me feel too much feelings. Jazzy put on BLK LVRS while we waiting for the car to heat up and the speakers is bumpin’ a good vibe, but my spirit feeling tight and sad listening to QWN. I start to hum along, thinking of the heat of Trinidad and trying to lift the feeling from my heart.
“I love this car. My dad fixed it up for me for my birthday. Since he got out of jail a couple years ago, he always trying to make up for all them years he was gone, although I tell him I ain’t tripping. I ain’t mad I’m done with that bus life though,” she said, adjusting the dials on the heater.
“It’s cool how you just yourself and tell your parents who you is,” I say to her, thinking of my mom and the day by the water and how it feel she stopped loving me after that. I try to imagine her accepting me as I am and I’m hurting more because I literally can’t imagine it.
“I do feel lucky actually, because I know kids who don’t come out because they know their parents will trip. Or they’ve come out and got kicked out. That’s why I understand Ursa’s situation. It’s fucked up because we are just being our true selves. I was scared, for sure, but my mom always taught me you got to be yourself or else you end up someone else you probably won’t even like.” She rocks back and forth to the music, while huddling into herself for warmth.
I is feeling tears well up in my eyes and I trying to breathe them back inside me, but I feel I is going to fall apart instead. I slowly begin to erupt and then I bawling and can’t stop.
The Stars and the Blackness Between Them Page 18