Notes on the State of Virginia, III Poem by Safiya Sinclair

After W. E. B. Du Bois


Wild irises purpling my mouth each dawning—
trauma souring the quiet street.
Its whole dark field roots me down and down. The mock-sun a blank obscuring. Fire whips
white-shock of lightning, bright Molotov angel, what ash marks assume a coon cemetery.

And all the names scratched out.
What burns this house burns apishly.
The mouth the church this immaculate body,
such untouchable sounds we have made of ourselves. A blues archeology. Thus like a snake
I writhe upward, mottling and spine-thick, where heavy nouns flay through my tubercular,

their heavens coil a twisted rope. Your veiled suffocation.
Unknown asphyxiate. The mourning dove which scales
its double gaze in tongues knows this: the broken world
was always broken.

How does it feel to be a problem? The mute centuries shatter in my ear.
The aimed black spear. This body, a crisis.
A riot. A racket. The whole world whistling.

Harass me a savage state, vast hectares will tar this noon infertile, each day a prisonhouse,
my sickbed
caulking each bloom a bruise.
Quick hands swathe me in miles of cotton. Now blood-stained sheets in my room.

There is an old woman who is not my grandmother.
There is an old sadness I was born to wear like a dress.
She feeds me condensed milk through a bird-feeder
and smiles,
says don't pay attention to the flies in my eyes.