Because I found out I couldn’t tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue
by Khalisa Rae
no, at twelve I did not give my mouth over
to the wave like every other girl my age. my tongue
would not crash and fold, but it did long to fly
to butterfly a course down the river and set sail
for places that didn’t require my most sensitive muscle
to prove I was “a woman now”. a trick for boys
to marvel at my tongue’s dexterity. for him to picture
all the ways I could summon a monsoon from his blue-white
empyreal, but I wanted to save that power
for myself. I wanted to guzzle my own water and say amen
to the drowning. and think of all the lightning
we control with our mouths. the storm shelter
and balm we conjure from the rubble. look
at all the unfolding we are doing right now in the midst
of this white squall.
Khalisa Rae is an award-winning poet and journalist based in Durham, NC. She is the author of Ghost in a Black Girl's Throat (Red Hen Press 2021). Her essays are featured in Autostraddle, Catapult, LitHub, as well as articles in B*tch Media, NBC-BLK, and others. Her poetry appears in Frontier Poetry, Florida Review, Rust & Moth, PANK, Hellebore, Sundog Lit, HOBART, among countless others. Currently, she serves as Assistant Editor for Glass Poetry and co-founder of Think in Ink and the Women of Color Speak reading series. Her second collection Unlearning Eden is forthcoming from White Stag Publishing in 2022.