Marissa Davis: “Though I was raised mostly in western Kentucky, my parents are from Ironton, Ohio, a small river town in the Appalachian foothills where most of my family still lives. In a way, the region is the ancestral home of my craft as much as my personhood—so much of my interest in poetry is born from an interest in music, and my conception of the rhythms of language is rooted in the particular cadences of my family’s speech: how vowels peak and flatten like the landscape, infusing any utterance with melody. In terms of theme, too, it holds its influence. The psychological and physical relationships of humans to land and environment is central to my work, and the physical spaces of my childhood—whether that’s the woods of my home, the hills and valleys of my parents’, or the Ohio River they both share—define the vocabulary of images I use to shape these conversations.” (web)
cleaving into four. Taurean. Joe. DeEbony. Akilah.
each sound its own spiritual. calls me by the thunder.
in each other’s eyes, we see your eyes rise like water.
on our sisters, we kiss the silk hills of your cheeks, we try to hold you
when we hold our fathers, try to rock you back into breath with the newborns we clutch over shivering elbows, to smooth the curdled blood off your chests & the stray curls shocked across your foreheads to wake the sweat raise the life-smell back into your skin your too-quiet skin but no—
: what shade of blood
is this soil
(our soil)
sprouting up
black death
(these bodies: our homes, our only)
like white magnolias
: see: same hue, same root.
i am from the southlands. & terror. i am
we say like it poured with us out our mothers’ wombs:
us & placenta & kudzu & high corn & tiger lily. & nigger.
Marissa Davis: “I wrote this poem in response to the recent shooting that occurred near Nashville, Tennessee. I grew up in a small Kentucky town not far from Nashville, and I spent four years in the city as a student. Though the motivations for this crime have yet to be identified, that this was a white man who senselessly murdered four people of color is a dynamic that cannot be ignored. Such events resonate throughout their communities because of the immense grief they cause—the stolen futures, the loved ones that cannot be seen or held or kissed or spoken to or laughed with again—but also for the fear that such an act might be repeated at any time, in any place.”