When I am Sad I Crumple And feel thrown away like my mother was in 1944. Blue-black baby abandoned. Blue-black baby banished to a narrow shotgun house on Bee Road. Sometimes she tells of the shine of the ax, the blade, how she chopped wood from Cedar trees. Sometimes she groans about the creak of an army cot propped in a backroom where she soaked the swollen knuckles in her hands. Sometimes she moans for the dead mother her dark fingers ache for. Sometimes she shuns the father who left her for dead. Sometimes I want to unfold her and smooth out all of her creases. © 2022 by Lolita Stewart-White
26
African Voices
