Nikki Blak

For Black Girs (Double Sestina)

For black girls
Faces neon
And variations of indigo
Tongues slick w/ slang and blood
You are tha most blessed
But, often times, this is not enough

Tha World does not trust you
Its machines cannot document you beyond
Legs splayed, on back
Cannot calculate tha latitude of your continent,
Lost in vortex
Of White Supremacy's frenetic dance

Your emerald mines and elephant's tusks are not enough,
Slave girls
But tha milk of your breast is blessed
Enough to wet nurse a serpent's child, until he is neon
Your womb, used against you to taint your own blood
And stain white skin indigo

You dance
But tempo and symphony don't move you
You school molecules on how to transform themselves into vortex
Perplex scholars to tha point of psychosis and beyond.
Confound atmosphere and continent.
Sprout magnolia trees from tha small of your back.

You tend a garden of aloe and indigo
Their feathered leaves and spiny stalks, sharp enough
To conjure blood
Mud pie girls
With neon
In their teeth and hands that are blessed

Petition caresses back
to your skin and lead sweat beads in vertical dance
Like precipitation from sky back to continent
It's soil and sea constructed you
Birth pains pushed you beyond
Mother's womb only to be consumed by this vortex

Often you are tha most blessed
Tha most injured, bleeding indigo
From wounds so profound, they blush neon
Severe enough
To be felt by other girls
Who share your blood

Their eyes, a violent vortex
Their mouths, talking back
Legs propelling them beyond
Tha Earth on which they dance
Girls who look like you
All ripped from a shared continent

Landscape where your blood
Has rivered tha deserts and fields and blessed
tha crops, cared for by girls
With locs tha color of indigo
And skin dark enough
To make the white of their eyes glow neon

Face as broad as a continent
Spirals corkscrew from your scalp like ebony vortex
Tha Earth has never known a beauty like you
You can turn your back
And eyes will still dance
Across your surface and beyond

Sky razors itself open and hemorrhages neon
every morning for you, soldiers spill blood
In hopes that it will be enough
to be blessed
with a glimpse of you, clothed in indigo
Afro girls

Lay your body across tha Atlantic's open grave, beyond
This cage of continent
Dance
Careen stubborn knees and heavy hands into blur of vortex
Carry yourself back
To tha place that saved a space for you

Sister with memory enough to neon tha Sphinx pink with graffiti
Black girls with curses and crusted blood under crescent of nail
You hav blessed your babies with nappy hair and indigo skin

Dance your pen beyond margin
To write whut you hav left for them. To recall your continent
Feed yourself to tha ancestral vortex that won't stop calling you back