blurring sea into starscapes through our tears. Some of us clutched

cuttings of okra in the earth-quieting hands of our clothes, sesame seeds and sweet honey

dripping from the rocks of our fists and undermining the shackles swallowing

every wrist. Some of us braided our relatives into our hair, Heaven-kissed,

furious flowers in the making with rice seeds storying the crowns of our heads,

gift constellations in the round, restless nights of our memory. Ask us

how it feels to greet a plate of food that is giddy to love us, to

illuminate the ways in which it and we are both daughters of the same passage, forever

joined at the lip. To know with the soft, warm sureness of our own

kind tongues that it is possible to out-love the end of the world. Ask how it feels to

line dance beneath an ocean of glistening ancestors with cousins we’ve only

met in sugar shack-nostalgia stories a few hours after our mother’s mother first

nights the sky. To know there is no place on earth where our grandmothers can’t find us.

On the frying pan of the fire next time, ask us how it feels to carry joygrief as

preternaturally as water does. To step across land and feel the bloody bodies beneath it. To

quiver at ports and beaches and town centers where some of us found a murder of further

reasons to steal away in a hush hour. To hunt the North Star,

secret codes whispering up from quilts and our cornrowed heads pressed

together into life-saving gossip, our bodies the atlas to Heaven.

Understand that if you call these histories mythology, we have made

vows to those who will come after us to outsing you. Like rivers

wearing down stone, we’ve blues’ed slave bibles into freedom gospels,

xenial funk earthquaking out of the soul-bludgeoning silence of an x on a census.

Yam candying a seven-day kiss out of the mouth of an apocalypse, all plantation-hating

zinnias and earth-hugging periwinkle. Star-faced and dancing beyond our graves.