Genesis/A Poem for Toni

by ANGEL C. DYE
in Fall 2019

Aliana Grace Bailey, "Division: Skin Complex," 2013

Genesis

a contrapuntal

In the beginning
                                          was the word                        God created
the heavens and the earth
                           the word wasn’t really                        a soulsong
                                                    a word                        really ain’t that different
                                            but a sound                        ‘cept for the souls
copper
                                      pennies plinkin                        colored people movin
onto subway
                                                      tracks                        platforms
                                                   up here                        down there
a chorus of
                                                       blues                        wheel screech
Mista Man tap dancin
                                                for dollas                        for diamonds
on streets
                                     paved with gold                        strewn with stray things
pew of hat-wearin sistas
and the tambourines
they beat
scat
is what would happen
                                if the angel Gabriel                        if sidewalk cracks
started a jazz band:
  holy boom
and BAM!

---

A Poem for Toni

She gather me
at an altar festooned for ancestors,
baptize me in florida water
then wring the wet from my tresses

She paint me
aqua, indigo, screaming cerulean

the bluest blue, high yellow, sugar brown

She wax wings for me,
strap them to my bent back,
iron my spine,
and push me skyward

She tell me give up that shit,
them bricks, them shackles

She see me:
big, vast, Middle Passage
wide and weary

haint holding my jagged throat

She see me
see me
see
me
girlgirlgirl circling

She pluck the rose over my eye,
say, “Fly,”

place my best thing in my palm
and the hand there is mine.

---

Angel C. Dye is a poet and scholar of African American Literature from Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas/Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A graduate of Howard University, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky, where she was a Nikky Finney fellow, and is currently a Ph.D. in English student at Rutgers University. Angel’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in About Place Journal, The Pierian Journal, African Voices Magazine, and Blue Mountain Review among other places. She writes in the tradition of Lucille Clifton, Amiri Baraka, and Sterling A. Brown, striving to carry on their legacies of unapologetic blackness in the face of oppression, radical self-love, and artistic activism. She aims to discover, as Audre Lorde explains, “the words [she does] not yet have.”