Lauren K. Alleyne // Poetry

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Origin

For my mother

1.

What is the sea without us?
Those run-away-after-school days –
bathing suits pressed secretly to our skins,
the dash at the last bell for the gates,
the ride never fast enough to the bay
where we’d shake the day’s burdens
into a pile: purse and pumps,
knee-socks, knickers, and white Keds,
always careful with the fragile
creases of pleated skirts and collars.
Me at six, ten, fourteen and growing
hormonal, heavier into my bones
but afloat in the salty water still light
enough to lift. Your small hands
wrapped around me you would laugh
at least I can always cradle you here.

2.

Two men saw us once:
You filling the wide mouth
of a calabash, working
the stream of water over my head;
my eyes shut to its salty sting
– our bodies drifting
in the evening’s easy repose.
Zami queens^*, they called us
we who never speak of desire,
who have no language for longing.
We hung at the end of their pointing,
called into our bodies – named.

3.

I try to conceive you
before mother, before me
but I cannot imagine
you
a shining nude,
innocent, bride, open
and wanting –
split.
And from that – me,
whole.

Yet, I am
here, your child,
borne by your body
hot and slick into this world,
its charged, different air.
Tell me,
what other longings called me
to you?

4.

In my own woman-years
I am swimming out
I want to understand this body –
this spirit house, this bloom of flesh.

I think back to the sea,
(its endless depth
relentless and forgiving
its constant return)

imagine
I am floating
the sun on my face
my arms a one-sided embrace of the sky

I am carried
past shore and safety
I open my mouth and I am flooded,
claimed; I cannot speak.

5.

I want to find you here.

* Zami or Zami queen is the local term (derogatory) for lesbians

Lauren K. Alleyne hails from the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. She is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Cornell University, and is currently the Writing Center Coordinator at the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. Her work has been published in several journals and anthologies including Gathering Ground, Growing Up Girl, The Belleview Literary Review, The Caribbean Writer, Black Arts Quarterly, among others. She was the 2003 winner of the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Award in Poetry and she is a Cave Canem fellow. 

Date of Publication: 02 May 2007