Ashia Ajani is a multi-genre storyteller and educator from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains. Ajani received a Master’s in Environmental Management from Yale School of the Environment and is a climate resilient schools educator and researcher with Mycelium Youth Network. Ajani’s words have been featured in Atmos, Sierra, World Literature Today and Frontier Poetry, among others. Check out a catalogue of Ajani’s writing at ashiaajani.com.
Durag
Forward moving, we always turn back
time. Like ocean, built of body, memory
the God of good grease paints follicles holy
and those waves, Lord, those ancient waves
facilitate a brother’s boldest baptism, wipe me
down, a litany of all the good that came to stay.
The Atlantic remembers every part of Black
anatomy. Like a curse, a calling: those cold waters
shift and stagnate under a cotton polyester blend.
They never got to lay claim to the water, but by God
How they dam(n)ed, privatized, seized, overfished,
extracted, deregulated, poisoned, commodified
pulled the cloth from the crease quick, like a run in
a stocking. Ripped the color clean from scalp-
an instantaneous divide reminds what can be taken
and what can be absolved.
Later, a Black boy will fit his mouth around the word rage
hold it behind his tongue, ferment his brooding into savage.
Watch him pull bones from the riverbed, casting wide
mesh drenched in cotton coagulations. Pray for summer rain
to rinse all these triflin’ transgressions clean. Any flood breaks
a bullet’s back, but does not siphon the blood back into body.
Baby, I can’t help but enshrine you as a vengeful sea God-
drowning in all that drip, all that wet, all that sheen.
