cutting greens

Lucille Clifton, 1936 - 2010

curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black.
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

These Bones Are Not My Child

“Maybe you are a crazy woman, but you’d rather embrace madness than amnesia.”

— Toni Cade Bambara, These Bones Are Not My Child

Black Women Writers at Work

“I’m committed to the idea that one of the few things human beings have to offer is the richness of unconscious and conscious emotional responses to being alive... you cannot exclude any human being from emotional participation.”

— Ntozake Shange, interviewed by Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work