Photo credit: Dominique Sindayiganza
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is the author of Strut (Agape Editions), Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation (Grand Concourse Press) and Karma’s Footsteps (Flipped Eye). Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies including Listen up!, BOMB, Black Renaissance Noire, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Golden Shovel, The Breakbeat Poets, and The Breakbeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic. She has performed poetry and taught in the United States, Namibia, The Netherlands, Belgium, and England. Her work is the subject of the film “I Leave My Colors Everywhere.” Ekere is the mother of three galaxies who look like daughters. www.ekeretallie.com
My Love for Him Ends the Occupation
My love for him:
inevitable as death
insistent mosquito
redwood roots
a memory in the blood his glance & honeyed dew
saunters down my thighs yes there is a graceless orange howl
that escapes my throat pulls night curtains
across the sky behind it the stage is bare
unset unsettled
yes Black people know how to do more than die
our kisses steeped long & patient
we conjured each other up unsettling that we love like this
move invaders out with raw silk feeling agogo tongues
uncolonize ourselves with genuine north star touch
I get my land back
now & then when we move in synch
40 acres of velvet soil beds of collard greens
rows of ecstatic tomatoes dignified yellow corn
(I’m not the mule)
out of my house hopeless feeling like the weather in Leeds
out of my house
The occupation is over
our loving moves back in
Final Quartet
(for Yasmeen)
1.
Wearing the name
of fragrant flowers
you gave your voice to the sea.
2.
Depression. Three sharp
syllables grinding
women’s bones.
3.
In frozen water
you unpacked your trembling
where were we?
4.
Are you in the seagull’s
cry? Is that your voice
rolling down my cheeks?