Alteration
you either get wrinkly or you get fat
and everybody in the Lucas family has a belly
hot food and song undo this sadness
101 smooth jazz plays
we questioned this American Dream, stepped into the ash
anyways. what else were we to do? we pledge allegiance
to sweet potato pie and
pints of gin. no old country, no motherland
recognizes our bric a brac language
lean into this Love Supreme, rewrite the Friend who
fuses forgiveness to
a trading post abandoned
the thing about our men is that
they are always suffering, and they suffer and
suffer and suffer just to produce something we can enjoy
shouldn’t we be grateful?
the spectators ooze their sighs, echoing paradise
no limit to the floodwaters in all their drifting.
every hand that touches
this maddening lightening cannot be unchanged.
how gladly I would go into that graveyard.
water memory
the Colorado River- a gaping wound dividing
space & time,
whose porous underbelly
now cracked, shattered sweat-less
siphoned off, divided;
no love towards
whoever
lives
down
stream. forgotten
histories of Puebloans,
mythologized ecology severs
ancestral claims of belonging.
the Colorado River- desiccated still waters
of an emerald hue
something like a stolen soul
or a captive God
forever recalling the precipice of disaster
what color will the water wars take?
Abstraction
A dialect unknown to my ears, but locked away in my soul
makes itself known every time your lips brush against my skin.
There is you, and there is peace. There is something about brown
eyes that make them unforgettable; something about brown skin
that makes you think of home, and all of the treasures you have lost
and the ones that must and should and will be reclaimed.
In this bed we speak the idioms of Nahuatl and Oshun
Our hearts unbridled by the burden of language
making space for our tongues to engage in more urgent matters-
the only sounds that emerge cannot be uttered in good company
My body gasping: I need you to love me a little louder
I need you to love me with your hands
I need you to love the parts this narrow white world
cannot make room to comprehend.
Our stories are caught between missionary church
containing the wildness of our spirits; beat the native
savages to cleanse the pure soul trapped under all that primitive lust
our own internalized shame creeping from the belly of forgotten history
We are but products of our environments
Here
We are witnesses to our own abstraction.
What pieces of art can be made from the entanglement of limbs?
Let me show you how these hips move like watercolor; how my teeth
shine like marble under an derobed sky, the eyes soften like fertile soil
A part of me has walked this land before, has known its ridges
and flaws without pause or remorse.
Those who wish to murder the past
ask that we wear our shadows lightly
But the hell that rattles in our vocal cords demands attention
Demands that we return home to the flesh coaxing our souls into soft bloom
Tell me: what is more beautiful than a brown body
in the aftershock of a climax?The earth’s motion ruptures every
time you dare utter your pleasure;
Marvel at how it spills from your throat like sugarcane.
Baby, our colonial pasts comfort each others trickle down
legacies, our ancestral sorrow runs through our veins like sludge
All we know is take is take is take
But here we are! You and I,
Folding back into the joy our forebears knew unapologetically
And doesn’t it feel good to be loved like this?
Before rejecting beauty, before despising the body
Before the binaries told us we couldn’t exist
In kneading the folds
In celebration of my nappy hair and your tall brown body
Everytime our honeyed middles intertwined
It is a big middle finger to the powers that want us to pretend
We know nothing of the magic that lingers in our flesh
every time our lips touch it is a song
Calling back to homelands buried deep beneath the industrial concrete
And can’t you hear the foundation shake?
We, sites of both promise and ruin
Can’t you hear Atabey weep tears of yucca and joy
At our most glorious creation?
Ashia Ajani is a Black storyteller hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains and the unceded territory of the Ute, Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapahoe peoples. They smile with the sun, and glitter with the night. Check out their work at ashiaajani.com.