Brown Girl Has Walked Into the Wild, Palms Open
See how she lists. The body is bent as light, as wind will it. And so you must tread light. Mind the rocks under foot. You must tread slow. There has been drought; see where water has long ago troughed, has carved her. See how she branches, twisting, her many hands reaching. Her roots also reach, sweetened from reaching. When fire arrives, she toughens. She will slough away the thick. She will be slick, and dark beneath the rough. She will mimic the fire her bones remember. Know her bones glisten. See how she rests. The body will fall, as time wills it. See how it hollows, how her pieces return to earth. And from her thick trunk, mushrooms cluster— Her belly a nest of moss and poison. When broken open, see what of her mother she has kept, what of her father, what of the stars.
Credit
Copyright © 2018 by Barbara Jane Reyes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 29, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
About this Poem
“This poem is part of a series/in-progress manuscript that includes mixtape poems, glossaries, and epistolaries to ‘some brown girl,’ one who finds herself to be invisible in the pages of literary works. This ‘brown girl’ resists being a flatly written sidepiece (as we see in the few popular culture depictions) and insists upon exploring her own rich interior life.”
—Barbara Jane Reyes
Date Published
05/29/2018