For Colored Girls

After the choreopoem by Ntozake Shange

Somebody, anybody, sing a black girl’s song. 

One day you are watching Waiting to Exhale 

with your mother. The next you are the mother 

though, you have bore no children. Kerosine 

on parisian suits, a cigarette falling

from Angela’s lips. The car goes up in flames, 

the same for your young heart. 

Suffering is a familiar kiss and Venus takes

her time with you. The cupid bow 

of her lips learn you again and again. Every time

she pulls away your body forgets itself 

and having come forth from the water,

she will not return between wash days. 

White birds and needing form a coterie

around her head. From a distance, 

you imagine they may be mistaken

for speech bubbles. From further, a halo. 

You point to each bird with a name: There’s longing, 

there’s leaving. There’s what you were lacking. 

You moved to California, where every day is the heat 

of summer, laughter is ricocheting out of umbrellas, fallopian pink 

and dusted with bird shit. Go to sleep warm

and wake up burning – your face is falling off the bone.

You are enraptured with the way gulls are releasing 

themselves across every bright thing they can find. 

It makes them no less bright. It makes it no less summertime. 

You throw back your head and the sun weeps

into your mouth. The touch of its salt turns stomach acid

to wine. Pitless, drunk in the afternoon

the roof of your mouth spits back stars

summer sings a bleeding heart lullaby

which only you can hear. And Night

can break too, her infinite pieces.

---

ELFRIEDA AMAKA NWABUNNIA is a Nigerian and Liberian-American poet originally from the Washington DC area. She studied Creative Writing at Georgetown University and earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of California, Irvine. She is a recipient of the the Schaeffer Fellowship for Writing and Translation and her work explores complexities of womanhood, blackness, identity, and belonging.

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