In a Nebraska grocery store, packets of corn yellow 
at me from the shelves and I’m back to the planting  
season, when the rains have appeased the land.

everything I am 
is wanting & needing/

every bone, every 
hollow, this image/

is a god fashion-made for you/

But you can see me there.
In the picture of the birds. 
In the church of avian beings. 
Small, colorful, and endangered.

“Titled after Malick Sidibe’s work of the same name, which means “Look at me” in English, I
collect pictures that speak to the pattern of beauty of the Black and/or African woman.”
—Mayowa Oyewale

he insists, we lost the civil war 
because i kept aiming at a god, only i could see
hiding behind a cloud.

how do i tell him that he’s my grandfather 
& i wasn’t born until 28 years after the war?

but if I knew one person in the world who could die
for others, it was you,
if anything on this table is bitter, it must be my coffee
stripped of milk,

I don’t remember most of it
It’s been a decade since I descended from the hill with paper wings sewn into my back.

I have four siblings, but spent the first eight years of my life as an only child. In that time, I understood the importance of having someone on your side—a sibling, an uncle, an aunt, […]

i am disgusted by what death

looks like even before the body begins to rot—

that being able to touch life into

unbecoming is not the kind of god i want to be.

i began:
god, swear my body is not a keepsake for all your silences.
swear you can’t hear these things droning like terrified frogs in my head.
swear you do not know that i am unwelcome in this body.