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Arisa
White
Arisa White holds a MFA from
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a recipient
of the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship from the
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and was recently awarded
a writing residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She
is a Cave Canem
fellow, currently working on a second manuscript inspired by
Nina Simone's "Four Women." By employing the use of dramatic
monologue and oblique presentation of theme, Arisa casts a
different generation of women who are confronted with domestic
violence, AIDS, motherhood and lesbianism. Her poems
appear in Gathering Ground: Cave Canem 10th Anniversary
Reader, Meridians, Softblow, Snowvigate.com, Failbetter.com, A
Gathering of Tribes, and African Voices.
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THE SPELL IS
BROKEN
My mother is want of waking
his kisses are all the alarm she needs.
Each night there are frogs on the doormat,
we’ve given up city holler for country calm,
from Greene Avenue to Shenandoah Lane,
I have thought too many times about wings;
the ways birds hoist themselves from the ledge
and land again with scripts of sky in their beak.
With all this thinking of jumping these frogs come,
their ribbit and slime greets toes and arches.
One even bold to hop on my foot, watches in wait
for his stomping, for fingers like Biology tools
to find the heart, the lungs, I learn to quiet my hand
when it parts flesh; tame my breath in the company
of dead things, the hush we walk around my mother's
sleeping self, enunciating each step in her exhalations,
hope she does not feel us like spider webs
across the face, and brush our presence into a ponytail,
a braid to rid her of our upkeep. And then on the day
when the frogs come of no surprise,
he is there. The one we packed our house in the night to get
away from. His bulging eyes and the southern heat turns
his skin moist. He walks pass me up to my mother's bedroom;
their cricket calls let us know she has not thrown him from
her hips.
FOLLOW
He sits on the edge of the tub.
Her hands afraid to leave her touch.
His flesh yawns a pit filled with juices
of boiled sorrel leaves.
She covers it with square sterile cotton.
Buried in the ripples of his laughter the elegy
to his back, to the hole
she can place her left breast into.
The gunfire left behind ellipsis
and a muted open mouth.
He washes his gunpowdered hands
with antiseptic. His fingers hold
a prayer. He rest his nerves
on susurrations to Jah & King Selassie.
Her hands free his dreadlocks
from the crocheted red, gold, and green—
the fourth wall of a prison-cell falls before his eyes.
She harvests bad thoughts with coconut oil.
He says, Da po’leece comin fa me.
She watches the bandage, says,
Get rid of the gun. I’ll take care of the weed.
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