Sulay,

A poem by Arisa White

After Audre Lorde

your haiku of a text informs me you’ve lost

yourself and you are not yet to be found—

we go for stretches without the other’s voice.

I’m often talking to you as if you are beside me,

while I clean the bathtub to soak an aching back

exacerbated from too much sitting and not a place to go.

I have lost my ass and I’m ready to bring her back.

There’s so much gospel underneath

your nursing bra. Lost in a state that wants

to detain you for suspicion of sickness.

Let me not tell you about the rabbit hole of

FEMA camps across the Midwest I’ve fallen down

and rose back up to the streets to catch the tail-end

of your prayers turned white noise, disinfecting and PPE

and everyone from Jesus to Christ is sucking you dry—

we do this instead of rage, we swallow.

2.

These moles on my neck weren’t always.

I panic at the sight of uncertainty, spend my days

away from the mainstream, then I’m pulled

into the feed. Black Twitter is tweeting the same

Black noise. This sea-to-shining-sea has lost its

technocratic mind, and if the home is the supermodel

of the nation, you are appropriately lost

on the beautiful plain of Tyra’s forehead,

breathless reading a meaty list of vaccines to give

Ali, there you departed in his cries. There is no

exceptional Negro going to convince me

to reproduce flesh for this nation, even though

you’re exceptionally Negress, my friend.

There are too many threats to immunize against.

3.

Shit’s just crazy—how many joints

can sisters smoke beneath moonshine

on swings singing from our stoned asses,

Friday on the campus lawn lawning,

passing left passing right down to a roach

we make the zigzag as we walk it

to 7-Eleven for Skittles and Doritos.

I miss your cheeks, their tight bulbs

in laughter and a shock of dark road.

As the veil gets snatched, I’m grateful

I left Her, myselves who I’ve lost wherever.

Look at it this way, we made a safety deposit.

Left Her where She is brave to live Her Life,

and even She will say goodbyes, distract Herself

with absences, get hooked on what’s before Her face,

obey some story She has no business obeying, . . . .

Somewhere out there She’s drinking more water than we are—

presently I’m withering in the mirror and that pucker-duck

pose reinforces this thirst we have for ourselves.

4.

What now has become of our breasts,

masks are blowing in the wind,

our chin hairs are longing,

I’m not happy with the approach of my manhood.

We got parentheses around our mouths

and too much to say for voicemail.

For everyday bills, we need readers and realize

compromise is another place to get lost,

and the strikethrough on another to-do

preserves the small privacies needed

to relieve the blood pressure, let a cry be cried

in peaces. I’m too tender-hearted and tired

to tell my spouse what’s the matter.

5.

I don’t blame you, overlooking a Manhattan

skyline, there’re new buildings to replace

your memory of the Twin Towers

and we can talk about it as history and your

morning coffee stays half-empty all evening,

you fear you are becoming pessimistic,

you‘re disappearing from your hands.

What to call ourselves now,

which identity won’t lose us?

Won’t tell us to cross back

to where we came from, be confused

by the beauty and displacement of our faces.

I know nothing but the truth with you.

In the sunlight of the art studio,

my freshman fall, your sophomore year,

we were beginners among too many Georgia O ‘Keeffes.

Our drawings and color theory

crude as our public school educations—

how is it that they skipped you a grade

when they misheard your “warm” for bait—

you offered me the last smock, balled

and rigid with dried paint, but I came prepared

to get dirty and left you holding

my mother’s petrification, wondering what

of grandchildren because two women make a mule.

Although, I have five other siblings who will give

her this designation, what I’ve recognized is she

won’t be able to redeem herself, this vision of herself,

her investment in her own grand emergence,

through the fresh eyes of my offspring.

With me, she remains glacial.

6.

Do we ever move on, Sulay?

You asking me to have a baby troubles

this Scorpio moon, disturbs my uterus once willing,

revisits an old love with regret. Memories are our

marble and granite and striking still is the bronze of NJ’s

scent twelve years later in my new home in Maine.

To disinter her from my notion of family and realize

I turned her into a crutch to transfer blame. Then the facts

of age, endometriosis, adenomyosis, fibroids making black

holes and protostars that will move through their own life cycles.

I’m gestating stellar days when others say thank you

for the ways I’ve mothered them.

7.

Here at the tips of our Newports we bought loose,

our fires fighting the loss embedded in woman.

I’m watching the drama series WILD,

and what few skills the stranded girls have

to make the earth feed them—no literacy

for plants, for reading any of the signs for water.

We have no clue about our food supply. This Epic bag

of chicharrones I bought because of its pretty packaging.

I still think pigs go oink-oink and shoot unarmed Black people.

I have skills for manmade things and I’m a manufactured good

who has never felt safe in this world to bring forth anything besides a poem.

Seriously, we cannot wait for a return perfectly imagined.

Any moment can summons the thing to be found—

Here, in my journal, on September 12th of 2001, it is written:

Frank’s on Fulton and South Elliot in Brooklyn, Sulay and I sit.

In 20 years we promise to be able to answer the questions—

WHO ARE WE? and WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO SURVIVE

THE DEMISE OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT IN AMERICA? Why

are we survivors. On the 12th of Sept 2021, we will remember

this day and the day before and the days after. With heart,

compassion, and love, we each signed our names in cursive.

To think, I went through storage boxes looking for a tracing

of your hand, only to find our twenty-something selves

drunk on surviving an attack on our city, in a bar the pandemic

will shut down, setting a date to report who we’ve found.

Arisa White is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. She is the author of Who’s Your Daddy, co-editor of Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates poetic collaborations that center queer BIPOC narratives. She is a Cave Canem fellow and serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press. To learn more about her other publications and projects, visit arisawhite.com.