Let Them Call it Sleepwalking
Like every other black woman, I sleep naked with a box fan in the open window.
When it rains and after my kid has sung into the dust-white,
spinning blades (laughing with distortion), after he is sleeping in his own dark room,
I crawl through my window.
The thinning brown of the curtains flutters up my spine.
The peeling paint like spikes splinters into my palm.
Still, I land under the roof pour, a cleansing.
I used to dance. So when I run in thunder and in lightning
my breasts sway against the compass but my feet never touch the flood.
They never touch the streets.
At the corner of Willow and Grandiose, where the beam from the street
curves my heavy braids into an aureole glittering with flying insects,
those puddles that made home of my collarbone heave and I heave
at the blue house that still stands pretty from the days when I pointed
ooh ooh oohs at it, back when an index finger was all I needed to claim a thing.
Had the rain stopped by now, I would have spit the lighter out from underneath my tongue
and set the blue to ash.
I grip the metal trash can from the curb instead. I grip it with my arms and with my thighs,
and I pirouette.
Through the three-paned bay window, all the shit once thrown away
enters the house atop a river and alarm.
And I sit on their green sofa, cross my legs,
turn my splintered palms up toward a dry ceiling.
Essence London is a M.A. student of English at Texas Tech University, the poetry intern for Oxford American, and a former (but always) advocate for the Field Office Agency. She is also a mother, a native Arkansan, and a budding letterpress printer. Her first publication is in the inaugural issue of joINT Literary Magazine, and she is a proud member of the grassroots organization The Watering Hole. You can find the beginnings of her work toward a Black literary press & center at cargoliteraryreviews.com.