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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