M. Eliza Hamilton Abegunde

At 16, she seduces the Jewish postman who prefers
Jack Daniels, Unitarians, and Black women of any age.
He forges letters from her father to explain her absence
at school the day he cums on her red silk blouse.
He sends her home in one of his shirts, dry cleans the blouse,
and has it ready the next time they meet. He teaches her to love
her breasts, to stand up straight, to demand satisfaction
even when he is through. He proposes her first year in college.
She declines, afraid her life will be defined by one-room
apartments and the smell of whiskey and rum
on days the sex is not good.

Instead, she marries a white man with red hair and blue eyes.
Not just any white man, but an Englishman, the one -
according to her father - whose history enslaved her own.
He has her father's name and he is an artist. Like her father.
His father raised Ayrshire cows on big farms before they were
bred into average farm animals. She doesn't care
that her own father will not speak to her for three years.
She will love her husband because he saved her life.
The one she didn't know she had until his tears opened
the wound she so skillfully covered with ice.
The one she vaguely remembers 400 years ago
when he bought her at Cape Coast.

At 28 she loves women because, in truth, she has loved them
all her life from the days in high school when
she invited her best friend to the prom, and then confessed
her undying love to another, both of whom politely refused
and offered to be her friends. They never told anyone she was
different. She has loved women since the day someone
just as curious let her taste them with her tongue, on her fingers,
on her belly. Only now does she realize that she has needed
a woman so badly that she will risk herself to know the truth.

She retraces the slave trade and makes it her life path
while still believing that everyone has suffered,
and that suffering is relative to historical impact,
the same incident never wounding two people the same way.
She wonders why her Korean-war-veteran father doesn't understand
this when he remembers standing alone after returning from war,
claustrophobic and frightened of never eating again. How his own
father refused to see him and he was forced to walk home
and enter a silence sealed in an alcoholic, Father Divine denial.

She writes poetry about six-year old girls being raped for
ten years by babysitters, beaten by fathers who beat
mothers and who later wonder what happened to make
them turn out like...that. She collects pictures of dead
children, does not believe the parents and neighbors
of missing children, advocates surgical removal of penises
that get misused, learns how to floor a 250 pound man
after Tammy Zwicki is murdered, and believes Jon Benet's killer
will never be found. When the rest of the world remembers
September 11, she remembers Tiona and Diamond Bradley:
two months, five days. Gone.

She loves the smells of her lover's breasts, the way they remind
her of warm milk, the way they fit into her hand, the way
the first time she saw her it was like the first time she ever
saw a naked girl and wondered why she couldn't do what boys
did without wanting to be a boy. She let her lover heal her with stories
of being kidnapped, her father's secret room, the Black Panthers,
and prison. She is grateful because she knows it is a gift
that the woman she loves can hold her hand or rub her back,
or prepare hot tubs filled with orange peels and bath salts
every night for a week just for her because it is cold outside.

In one week, she loves three beautiful women because
they listen, and she so rarely speaks of punches and
yellings that frightened her into writing before she knew how to cry.
They tell her about their lives like her mother and grandmothers
would tell if they were alive and, because like her, they are no longer
afraid of History mothers fathers brothers internment camps strangers
who made the mistake of believing they were already dead.
Each morning, they wake up and, knowing they have become
Kali Ma, Oya, Hecate under their smooth ageless skin,
regret nothing because at night wherever and whenever they want,
they can sleep naked in the open moonlight.
And all the stars bend to whistle.