Moving Target
‘My body, on the day I learned to remember became a labyrinth of secrets’
-Chinaka Hodge
1.
the day my mother promised me the gravity
of the moon was the day I found my body
was meant to be a ocean
but was only a hallow shark skin drum
only pillars of stories that never stuck
a belly that would never swell, tides
that never pulled, mountains
I couldn’t conjure, scars
where hips should have been, beauty
was the lie our mothers told to us in tradition
and truth was a story that left
a bitter taste like sour poi on our tongue
2.
Everything was brown when I was born
Family was a gradient crater that was too wide to understand
but by age 6
my eyes learned to polarize and measure
I learned the difference between mother and father
was a continent
and 15 points on a chromatic scale
I knew then
I would spend the rest of my life
Trying to fit into the oceans between them
3.
our skin tone kept us
quiet
from questioning these bodies
wondering which parts were broken
we learned to be
complacent in our difference
while we soaked in the silence
let the salt seep into our skeleton
leave its mark
make us feel like we belonged to the ocean
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