a ghost town is full of life

to be mortal, mean, and impressive

tw: death

There’s a tear stained mat at the foot of the door

In a great room on a green couch 

a black girl with afro puff sits quietly

in a white dress, bare feet, the juice of watermelon dripping down her chin.

Leopard teeth in a jar on a mantel, white candles burning, selenite pieces keeping them company 

there are women in black gathered at a table, spirits perched on the front porch. 

Laughter and salt water are scattered through this place 

They remember her fondly.

I am dancing through the wind. Crossing the eno river. making my way to the sand, to the ocean with banana leaves, broken glass, and the smell of roasted peanuts

I’ve been walking a long time, but I am not tired.

They will scatter me across many lands and universes. Loose box braids, dead skin, the smell of sweat and lavender oil occupying multiple spaces across time—my ancestors can smell me coming. 

I’m here now.

Prone across a dented mattress.

It’s hot. My stomach is empty.

The salt water rarely comes though the memories warrant the flood

Should I have children?

I can’t remember if I showered today. 

When will I leave this place?

Will I know it when I come back?

Did I find love? Did the bones set and regain their range of motion?

My eyes are closed

The girl in white wipes her chin

she wanders to the kitchen meeting the women in black

She has many memories, but they still have stories to tell her.

One with big hair and a nose like my own, picks the girl up and places her on her lap.

They are looking at pictures. Of me. 

The wind rustles, someone on the porch laughs loud, the soft crack of vinyl rouses somewhere. 

A faint smell of lavender floats through the house.

---

my inescapable death is something that sometimes keeps me up at night. the idea of not knowing. the black hole or the ether, as i often name it. to experience the fullness of life and have it slip away from you. but i think i’ve come to realize that my fear is not in the ending itself, but the constant yet sudden realization that i am transient.

existing in a youth obsessed society that measures success by how much you produce and how soon is exhausting. to be a prodigy. to be your best self before the age of 30, when life most certainly begins to lose it’s magic and meaning. maybe i am not afraid of dying, but afraid of falling into the dark waters of being unknown, drowning in forgotten-ness. as a first generation american, i often wonder what it would have been like to be raised outside of the west in a society that celebrates aging and dying as not only natural, but exciting and welcomed experiences. existing in the western world can feel so lonely. in the face of this pandemic the reality of loneliness is one that has come to live with all of us more frequently. it feels more present—-that we are actually alone in this experience of being alive. just as the idea of my mortality often jolts me into dysphoria, the idea of community are the hands that shake me out of it. we are in one body, living one life, as far as we know, but many of us have the honor of living it with an abundance of warmth from others. community, the people we know, and chose to know, is not the absence of loneliness, but the presence of possibility and shared experience. community—i am reminded of my long parked car conversations with friends, walks with my dog, or hearing my mothers stories of her childhood—there is so much possibility in interdependence. the world feels like it is ending, but it has ended many times, and will end many more, and in this moment of uncertainty, i often envision who and where i would be during the apocalypse. who are the people i would want to survive the end of the world with? who are the people i would share resources and fleeting happiness with? who are the people i would want to die with? who would i want to hold my hand as i walk, not slip, into the unknown? i have come to the conclusion that community is the only legacy that matters—it is lasting because it transforms, transcends, and transfers. that realization brings me so much joy.

when i think about the inevitably of death, i think about all the black women and black people before me who have lived and died. who have lived wonderfully breathtaking lives and heartbreaking realities. how so many of them were not afforded “good deaths”—ones that allow autonomy or the sanctity of memory and celebration, but instead had ones that were forced upon them, chosen for them. i want more than that for myself and all of us. zora neale hurston often comes to my mind. she was an athiest, a pragmatist, and didnt believe in anything beyond the now. she lived and died. and was forgotten. she spent a life time exploring the possibility of her personhood, creating timeless works and ideas in between. work that had to be unearthed for the collective memory by another black woman decades later. if not for the community breathed to life by black feminism, womanism, black liberation praxis, and art, many of us would not know her name. but even if we did not know the story of zora — the girl from eatonville, the writer, anthropologist, archivist—there is still eternity in her existence simply because she lived. alice walker says of zora, “her work had a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings-” the point of living is not to be immortal—not to be remembered, but simply to live, and do things worth living as defined by ones self. to live as complete, complex, and undiminished as possible.

i wrote this poem as an escape from this fear and a celebration of the lives i have lived and will live before i die. as a celebration of the beauty and global black traditions of living and dying. in celebration of the black women who live, have lived, and will live.

photo credit