Day 657: Moving Target (edited)

‘My body, on the day I learned to remember became a labyrinth of secrets’
-Chinaka Hodge

We spent our youth
Assuming a loaded barrel
Even when it wasn’t
We had all the parts to be complete
We just didn’t know how to properly assemble
So instead
We bent over backwards to keep our hearts off a trigger that didn’t have a consequence
And Between breaths
Pounded our bodies into small bullets to fill spaces where promise are held


1.
they day my mother promised me womanhood
was the day I found
my body was meant to be a temple
but now was a hallow drum
a space waiting to be full
only pillars of stories that never stuck
scars where hips should have been
only a part of what should be complete
beauty
was the lie our mothers told to us in fairytales
before we learned to scrub truth from our scalp raw
we kept ourselves open for interpretation
a lonely empty magazine


2.
Everything was brown when I was born
all ashes and shades
a sepia sunrise
but by 6
my eyes learned to polarize
I learned the difference between mother and father
was a continent
and 15 points of a chromatic scale
i found only parts of my skin
were made of the ocean I called home
Burnt brown promises
Bronze bullets
Nothing about this body sparkled in the sunlight, like my mother
I am citrus copper
Sunset on sand stained skin
I knew then
I would spend the rest of my life
Trying to fit in the margins between them
in the barrel the size of centuries of expectations
Waiting under the weight of a golden trigger
I am a bullet
Everything about me wishes to be kept quiet
secret

3.
promises are made to be forgotten
secrets
to be broken
our bond
was perfect penmanship
and personalized stationary
the things that kept us quiet
unaware that this silence
was the breath under the trigger
something waiting to be pulled
to be changed

we spent out youth
wishing to stop growth it its tracks
we found our mothers
stuffed into small cylinders
waiting to be pulled
but we never had the heart
to properly assemble
that parts of our selves that weighed us down
I woke up this morning to my secrets screaming through skin
Wanting to free them
But not having the faith
To squeeze the trigger