sister, pick which battle to win when you choose to lose the war
I tried staring at the sun once because I needed a metaphor.
I held my head in a lake, breathed sediment,
cut my wrists with tiny blades of sand. I think about suicide
often, I think of other people doing it, I think
about women too strong to be my ancestors
stepping off a ship and into the ocean’s font,
that baptism, the salvation of discontinuity. I remember
my heroes shoved their heads inside cannons
to muffle the blow. Their oath: death is emancipation enforced
& over & over I repeat I have to tell my baby
***
Photograph of Ashanti Anderson by Ashanti Anderson.
