so then we’ll be children!
playground for ourselves
for once, tread the waters—
for there is something about water,
it's secret, swallowed perhaps,
jaw of foam and rusted seaweed
browned, perhaps, with the people,
perhaps, that have made it
their own. Imagine the call,
salvation an unspoken trunk rattle
of the teeth, oh how the sirens riff! Imagine the drifting
down, becoming the only light below
the Mesopelagic, setting a table
in the soot, soft enough to pencil
Genesis with every curl of the toes,
bold letters all bowlegged in the dark,
safe from judgment and wondering
how anyone could believe Heaven
was a sky haven when the ocean
saved so many—
reclaim the life haloed from a ship’s deck
snatch our waves from the enamel
of the sharks (like the sharks we were
induced to be weapon from birth,
serrated skin &
evolving with the hunt,
doing
to survive
& we have survived
to cash our stolen years:
find in us a youth
like a child
that makes better
of the parent,
and drown content.
*“To give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children,” - Thomas Jefferson
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Deshawn McKinney is a writer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His art, grounded in hip-hop,
explores the delicate balance of existence, and he holds an MA in Poetry from the University of East Anglia. His debut chapbook, father forgive me, was published in 2021 by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press.
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