after Danez Smith, with a line by Ol’ Dirty Bastard by Safia Elhillo

Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be celebrating the poets from Women of Resistance. Sudanese by way of Washington, D.C., Safia Elhillo is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation, and Crescendo Literary and The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator.

after

after Danez Smith, with a line by Ol’ Dirty Bastard

if you read this in red maybe i didn’t
survive     every day i go missing    one
eyelash at a time     or sometimes               all
at once               & in the heaven for
blackgirls gone away     we walk in
& out of rivers & wear    our good silks
our good brown velvet bodies    dripping
with sunlight     we sprout leaves & no one
decides for us to cut or keep them   we
bear fruit & self-sustain               we tread water we
pluck the moon for our hair & another grows
in its place       we are sistered or unsistered
but never again to a dead thing     somewhere
a rope turns & turns & our feet never       touch
the ground       somewhere a song playes
& plays & names us with each touch of a needle to our
round black surfaces
i’m hanging out               /partying/with girls/that never die

after

Further Reading