Ayisha Knight

Pass It On

Shhh. Don't tell anyone.
It will be our little secret.
In the basement,
clean laundry mixed with
dirty deeds
allow a secret to be kept.
By the time I rejoin
the party that never missed me,
I have buried the memory
beneath lost time
and the lie that says
I have the right to
remain silent,
but not before
I remember
the smell of semen and tide.
Alone I
Remember and
Anger metastasizes into fists
Pulverizing internal organs until suicide permeates
Every thought.
Memories stain my consciousness
with false testimony
given by lying tongues
pre-treated with
fear and guilt
until I, brainwashed
start spinning through
endless cycles of self-hatred
soaked with shame.
I was so confused,
I couldn't even remember my name,
so I wore the label of victim
forgetting I was neither
until ten years later,
when wisdom cloaked
in poetry
unraveled lies with its
spoken truth
and healed this
wrinkle in time.
Ladies, gather round,
listen to the whispers
then pass it on.
Tell everyone,
they have the right to
speak the word
because elevation begins with
revelation and dirty laundry
mixed with dirty deeds
have spelled trouble for too long.

Perspectives

With your thermonuclear touch
polar archives dislodge and melt
until I'm flooded with
multicellular ghosts
aching to solidify antimatter into
a sheer vertical mountain of accessibility.
I felt safe until your hurricane tongue
dripping with metaphysical philosophy
took my breath away.
You guided me into other realms,
and clear-cut theories about spiritual characteristics
and tangible emotions became cloudy
because poetic translations
narrated by an aphasiacs dream
make me follow epileptic
streams of consciousness
illuminated by alpha waves.
You looked beyond the
self destructive chain,
saw who I was before scientific dissertations
and expensive words punctuated with PhD's
took control of my speech,
taught me that gut feelings are more than
proof of indigestion, especially when
you taught me I could translate
Quantum physics into poetry.

Royalty Revisited
King Tut starved himself when
I told him he was too old to
suckle my regal breasts
and the sphinx remained
riddled with silence when he
couldn't figure out how
locks pinned beneath
gemmed tiaras don't
define me as a queen.
See, the jewel cup between my thighs
has been pouring silk threads for centuries
decorating my remarkable divinity.
The enigma of my power left
ancient gods breathless
rendering them frozen in worthless statues.
Millennia can't count
how many mortals
have kissed the ground I walk on
just to taste a grain of diluted heaven.
I stay adorned with pride and inspiration
draped in scriptures and
baptized with the words of
Nikki Giovanni and Alice Walker.
While history books thought they could pacify me with
paragraphs on Martin, Malcolm and Nelson,
my mother and I used the Earth's axis to excavate core
minerals and write the life stories of
Coretta, Betty and Winnie.
Glancing at the star maps tattooed on my collarbone,
I took Zeus off my mountainous shoulders,
and let him rest in the grand canyon of
my cleavage until he fell asleep,
passed the time by making
thunderbolt rattles out of Nefertiti's bones,
used my wisdom teeth fillings to
paint stars in the Delta Quadrant,
and my unedited poetry became gospel.
I was sculpted from the Navajo's blessing
to walk in beauty and here
I stand at the crossroads
of those who walked before
and now with me.
I remember when Harriet Tubman used to wade in the Nile
and Angela Davis' fro was just a nap of Sojourner's truth.
Each woman is my stepping stone
but together, they make up the mosaic
lining my Atlantic ocean pool,
weathering monsoon tidal waves
in a testimony to women's strength.
My flawless skin baked brown by
a cowering sun
requires no masking foundation, makeup or diluted perfume
cuz I've got Ida B Wells speeches hanging onto my ears.
Orion's stars illuminating my hips,
and Saturn's rings around my toes.
Intoxicated by my ability to fill
black holes with misbegotten history,
I fed King Tut and told the Sphinx
He could now share my story.

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Cover Design: Joseph McNair