Black Bark After Ana Mendieta’s Tree of Life I decided I wanted to be a black girl. If I couldn’t be a black girl I’d be a white girl but I didn’t want to be a white girl. I find a tree and drag the bark on my skin, some grasses and earth, until I am black by the sweat of my own skin. I’m caught by a pool and captured and shipped someplace else. It’s such a shitty thing they do to me but it’s only the first shitty thing. One shitty thing after another happens. I wonder why the goddess I pray to allows this to happen. I don’t know her anymore, and no one knows me anymore. I will not titillate you with sordid confessions, nor will I dwell upon the horrors inflicted upon me. Instead, I will eat the black beans of my own skin. It was a dangerous decision to become a black girl. I didn’t know my skin would be a red flag, and my people would be lynched. But I feel better not being white, since it’s the whites in charge that lynch black girls like me whether they knot the rope or not. Whether or not you know it or not, the tree where they tie the rope is the tree that bathes my black skin with tree mercy and consolation so my black soul wiggles loose from the noose, junks its losses, and slips past them. Mary Meriam Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press and edits the Lavender Review: Lesbian Poetry and Art. She is the author of My Girl’s Green Jacket (2018) and The Lillian Trilogy (2015), both from Headmistress Press. Poems appear recently in Poetry, Prelude, and Subtropics.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesJoin us: Facebook and Bluesky
May 2025
|