Gods Themselves
Brittany Bostic
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When did my body become something to fear?
Was it when the melanocytes crackled alive and painted my skin Black
as fireworks Pollock night skies?
Was it zygotic, this thing that built me fearsome?
Chromosomal cataclysm, one X unto X in my cells
like cars ruptured into one unseemly twist of metal.
Am I so frightening in my Blackness?
In my womanness? My girlhood?
Is there terror to be found in a body that gives life?
In a body like a lantern that holds within a candlelight – a new someone, all her own.
Is that horror? Unto whom?
If I am woman, I am artist.
I am maker.
I am made.
This body bears the formula, the root of all creation.
It exists in me a mystery,
Something ancient, nebulaic.
Something harbored in the afterlife, afterbirth of felled red giants.
Without my knowing, without decision,
This body picks apiece the sediment of long-dead stars
And rearranges them in human shape,
Little fire in the belly,
And incubates for them new life, to rexperience the universe itself
This time instead through human eyes,
So fallible and infinite in worth.
I am wrapped in skin dark as the space between the stars.
I am woman to my basest cells – a human nebula.
And that, to you, is frightening.
I see the recoil and the curl.
The averted eyes and spoken word anathema.
That’s fine.
Some people fear the gods themselves.
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Brittany Bostic is a Black artist, writer, and educator living and creating in California. Her poetry is slated to be published in Eber & Wein’s anthology later this year.
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Posted in Black History Month and tagged in #boudin, #poetry, Poetry