KWANSABA IN WHICH YOU STAY
I am a puddle you stomp clumsy
or playful; absorb & ombre into stain.
Dampen the anodyne bass of blood flow
warm with kinetic traffic of oxygen &
what once was. Caress of curious healers:
hands slick with my thin wet. You.
Never riled by the sight of blood.
This poem is from the chapbook What We’ve Become by darlene anita scott (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/what-weve-become-by-darlene-anita-scott/
Casually read, What We’ve Become is a collection of poems about romantic love; more broadly it examines how we decide our days. Defined as mutual trust, care, and acceptance intimacy is an enigma. Humans crave (and require) mutuality, but humans do not crave the vulnerability required of it. Intimacy expects the person practicing it to be vulnerable and vulnerability is inherently unsafe which challenges our primal survival instinct. This is the paradox that motivates these poems where subjects decide to endure in, or evade, intimacy also to meet their primal needs. The choices determine not just who we do or don’t spend our lives with but how we spend them.
darlene anita scott is a writer and multidisciplinary artist who explores corporeal presentations of trauma and the violence of silence especially for Black girls. She has exhibited her artwork on the “good girl” widely. Her debut poetry collection, Marrow (University Press of Kentucky) reimagines people lost in a mass murder-suicide at the Guyanese settlement of Peoples Temple founded by James “Jim” Jones and popularly known as Jonestown, and she is co-editor of the creative-critical volume Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge).
The Paddock Review 