host
For us, the ancestors came too early
slipping in and out of doorways,
rustling like silk
grief a perfume lodged in our throats.
For us, the heart is a continuously open wound.
We mourn elders denied
making families where river meets sea
sweet bleeding into salt
salt drinking in sweet
until all boundaries cease.
Maybe this is why we love so helplessly
stretching the word far beyond its modest capacity:
there are always more names to speak alive
new gods on our altars
many spirits who sleep in our beds
receiving our bodies as offerings.
Copyright © 2025 by Chibueze Crouch-Anyarogbu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 10, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I was thinking about what it takes to love expansively amidst constant unfathomable loss, how love and loss sharpen each other. What happens when we let grief become a portal to love, and vice versa? What else slips through that wounded opening, and what does actively tending to that channel look like? I drew inspiration from intergenerational impacts of genocide in my own matrilineage, spiritual ritual, and the glorious, difficult liminality of practicing queer kinship. I learn from living and nonliving beings who transmute the divisions separating us, reminding me to keep love and mourning in perpetual relationship.”
—Chibueze Crouch-Anyarogbu
Chibueze Crouch-Anyarogbu
