Omotara James
Markers
The day after I don’t die from a gas explosion, I wash and weigh the fruit,
measure the half cup of granola. I am careful. I bleed with the tenderness
my nipples promised. Ricardo jokes I’m now living on borrowed time.
I chuckle with more shame than joy, trying to remember a time I didn’t
live this way. Even from the womb, my grandfather (doing what men do),
inserted himself into my mother’s pregnancy. Declared it was either him
or me. We are manhandled from birth. It’s the beginning / middle / end
of the month and there’s so much I want to do. Thoughts I need to think.
A list of emails owed the length of Rumpelstiltskin’s piles of hay, and
half-hearted apologies I wholeheartedly don’t mean. I wait for the rejections
to come. Let go of the acceptances with the same startle with which they arrive.
I mostly save my reactions for the processing of my future self.
Today is a day for memory, which is the beginning of allegory. Perhaps memory
is the true offering, or how we honor God. The last words Kimarlee wrote
to me before she died were thick with anticipation and the glory recently achieved,
the beauty yet to come. Said we didn’t even know how much she was about to tear
shit up. And what of it? The novel she was so close to finishing. The applications
and submissions still in the queue. When April died, I owed her an email. A thank-you
for advice generously given. After, I thought anxiously about the cancellation
of her credit cards, her website’s impending disappearance from the internet. The search
engines. The world wide web. Her poems, unpublished and uncollected. Kimarlee lost
all that weight. April got the amazing job. Some part of me still insisted time is
the unspoken spoil of victory. Even though I knew better. My dimensions flattened
across my unearned timeline, I, as caught as Waldo in the brightly colored
picture book. Uncircled. Clutching my work as tightly as I clutched my blouse
shut at school. The cage, half open. The desire to be seen, fully flown. Loosened
from the bone. Sometimes I come off as flaky. Ricardo thinks I’m depressed. Honestly,
I am simply awful. I am as awful as the last words to tumble out of Darlene’s nearly
dead mouth, “Tara I don’t know what to tell you.” I hold on to them like seconds.
Omotara James is the author of Song of My Softening (Alice James Books, 2024). Her poems have appeared in NPR, the Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, BOMB magazine and elsewhere. She has received support from the African Poetry Book Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Lambda Literary and the Cave Canem Foundation. Currently she writes, teaches, and edits poetry in New York City.