YASHIKA GRAHAM
There is only wailing
on day one
then there is jazz
something other
than heat coming
out of this corner of the land
and there is Sunni Patterson
who says stand
woman,
stand
and I do. I rise
dizzied now and pulled
down by the shedding,
then there is dark water,
a black river, blood
and I hear we will get through this
for its stance as unmet promise
and it is this I must overcome
most, knowing there is no return
worthy, finally concluding
that of both man and
child I am empty
that I must walk around this house
and not get to the person I was making
calling for an unnamed son
me in the dark, me one.
The first cries
are for the child
then it becomes about his father
the next are mixed blood and salt water
and by day three I do not know
for whom I cry.
Then there are days made of pure pain
the belly growing down, contracting,
the stomach overturned, unable to receive
and I think of all I have wasted,
how I must now labour out this love,
so some days it is for myself
that I come undone
the mother who did not become,
but held you, my child,
only me, holding you.
Inheritance
They say I get my cheekbones from my father’s
side of family, my feet from my grandmother
who at fourteen started treading Great River gully.
They say she’d heat five irons in a fireside one time,
then to market, to market, then to river
to wash my father’s clothes.
They say these are Miss Nelly’s feet,
her walk, that my people have halted
trucks with the roots of themselves
and that here they are again.
My sister visits, confirms it, and I see now
how this blood, these limbs might repeat,
have repeated and yet I resist, convinced
that I have only ever belonged to my mother,
that my father, who deserted her, deserved
nothing in this house except my slicing eyes,
that he could’ve kept the component set,
the love letters, the lyrical lies.
But my father knew well how to dodge me,
from I was knee high till the last time
we sat on the concrete, his face wet and wilted
with pleading and pretence, with his fear
of court and child support.
And I do not know who he was to his lovers,
but I hold heavy the bitter bean dinners
and the evenings we went empty,
unable to find him or to convince
shopkeepers to trust me.
I know only that my mother has threatened
him so we might eat. And for my pity,
he promised dolls, houses, promised to stay,
then like a culvert he washed these things away.
My father, words sweet like soft drinks,
willed me to rescue his hat from my mother,
to use my tiny hands to pull him from an old fire.
Calling her a quarrel, he didn’t tell me
that in turn he would try his hand at her life
with her own hook handle umbrella.
I deliver his disguise like a little girl
and he is gone. He convinces me
that to be good is to bend
and I believe him.
I cannot know how deeply this guts
till I am part-loved and alone again.
I get my cheekbones from my father’s
sleight of hand, a buck-ups on purpose,
so I am always tussling with myself.
I get my keep-away from his shifting
dance around the heart compound.
Father, how I wish I were nothing like you.
