Marlanda Dekine-Sapient Soul

mdekine@gmail.com 

 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.47106/4rwj.11108987

 

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How To Stay In Your Body When Someone Wants You Out Of It 

 

My great-great granduncle fled Plantersville, South Carolina one night 

After being called a nigger by a white man and answering

That white man’s body with a knife quick
He dug in and got out of town 

 

I am told he always came back down South to visit

In his shiny car with arms full of gifts for children

One might ask which is worse: 

    A word or a knife? 

 

I heard about how I come from an old place
How I was taken from circles of sinners and saints

How transmissions from thousands of years ago 

Speak to me today 

 

How love permeates distances
That intellect cannot answer
Having saved ourselves from monsters, one might ask: 

    Is there a difference? 

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Granddaddy’s Tools 

 

I am thirty-three 

It is the first time 

 

I have put my hands 

On a shovel 

 

And drove it into the earth 

It is the first time 

 

I feel
My dead granddaddy alive inside of me 

 

And I am digging a hole 

To put me in 

 

With granddaddy's shovel
My daddy yells for me to stop 

 

Lying in the middle
Of granddaddy’s field of grasses 

 

Says the moisture 

Will make me sick but 

 

My ears have a new fear filter and 

I am listening to Spirit 

 

I am not dying today I say 

I am being reborn 

 

Daddy go

And fetch the water 

 

Here comes the Sun! 

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A Queer Meditation

 

Today, I woke up and I didn’t rush to do a thing

I let my hands touch one another 

 

Their softness caught me off guard
I watched the intimate folding of my glistening 

 

Digits in shadow and damp bedsheets

I went and stood under the shower 

 

I let water wash purple all through

My body and worries 

 

I watched it all swirl 

Into a pool beneath my feet

 

Today, I thanked my feet for all the worlds 

I have walked in and out of 

 

Today, I woke up

Kissed my born again self 

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