Poems
Black Indian
All my journeys begin
in north carolina
without my knowing it;
Black Indians pushed like September crabshells
on an angry winter shore,
swept up in the storm of Moby Dick’s adventure.
The literature of us wiped and creamed
against an outcrop of colonizing rocks.
Our acorn, our buckskin, our dreaming, crushed. Corrected.
Under the weight of change, we became husks of ourselves.
We were Neusiok, fading into Coharie ghosts on a river bank.
We were redblack wolves chewing our wrists from the arm.
We fought next to the Tuscarora,
beading ourselves into a story of lush rivers
and swampland and defeat,
unaware of the coming. Saddles and horses and silver in white mouths,
sweeping us up in their fingers like dust in the corners
of black powder pouches.
We ran. My family escaped
from that swampland in sampson county into tennessee,
to indiana,
then michigan.
Indian, Mulatto, Colored.
Black.
We planted ourselves next to the Pottawatomie
and Ottawa like cornstalks.
We grew
into a farmhouse on fire.
Copyright © Shonda Buchanan
Black history (for the Se Ba family) (Excerpt)
In honor of the first 20 Africans/Angolans who came to Powhatan, or “Jamestown” shores.
road to kaolack is broken
lined with baobab trees, yak urine
palm leaf huts, severed goat hooves
swayback women
swathed in vibrant cloth, young women in jeans
slipping like quiet shadows alongside road
baskets on heads, hips swaying
just like in the movies
freeway crunches under tires
forty years of tribal bones and nepotism, sifted over
zones refolded and erased
red chrysanthemum dust
slides east and west into every other village
smokes like a dry blood river bed as cars pass
shimmers like a tone-deaf cardinal in the distance
road mangles around a parking lot, an open market
soon narrows to one lane where
ten year old boy directs traffic
like the man his eyes say he is
path opens to more red earth, dried up salt beds
more beaten down grass, suddenly, i can’t breathe
diesel fuel sprouts black lung clouds that blossom like a knowing rose on
horizon/ but of all things, today, i have to breathe
////
and this is my africa
when you give them something
when they give you something
whether it is water or a scarf
a bead, a prayer rug or gold
it is as if every gift concerns your soul
and theirs
and the family’s honor
and it usually does
and this is africa
where i will always and never
belong, here on a broken road
in the memory of the ten thousand things that will never be told
nothing, nothing like the movies
Copyright © Shonda Buchanan
Black Woman Down
The breath. Sycamore spores and black girlhood calcified in a copper memory.
Inhale. Touch the bruise until it fades into a place that can never be seen again.
Mama. Pour all your blood into a thimble and top it off with “why daddy always beating me?”
And when she grew up, “shake that money maker.” So she did.
The breath is a swollen kiss in the eye of a tornado.
The breath is a copperhead snake under your stairs.
The breath is each child that pushed itself out of her body like a beautiful bloody fist.
She’s still breathing.
///
The breath is my childhood running in a grassy meadow, then dancing on pimento seeds.
But I will not die here.
The breath is a circle of black women strung like garlands around your neck.
The breath a sweat lodge in heaven.
The breath a doppelgänger. Asking, is that my breath or the breath that breathes like me?
The breath is wagontrail quiet. Slaves crawling against the Choctaw night, ant beds and river beetles in my hair holding my urine so the dogs won’t smell me.
The breath a beast. Ravaging through the body caverns like dragonflies in love.
In the first marriage, the first molestation, the first bruised lip, it won’t let you die.
///
The breath is sugar water rolling through a black woman’s body until we sleep.
The breath is your black child asking you to keep your black power opinions and poems to yourself. The breath is a river crashing into the mountainside until there is a hole large enough for history to come through.
The breath is Latasha Harlins reaching for orange juice.
The breath is Sandra Bland’s rope silently singing.
The breath is a tree wishing away the chainsaw.
The breath is a black woman down.
But I, we
will not die here.
Copyright © Shonda Buchanan
