What Kind of Omen Am I

Poetry
Written By Zakia Henderson-Brown

[from the print issue FW16]

after Black Thought

 

Seeking riches? Become the only raised presence in a field so any bird will know where to shit. Let a swallowtail alone on a sill to attract success. Do lunar blackouts yield sea levels upping the horizon

 

to god? Enticing, save for a bunch of dead species floating like maimed angels. Don’t start anything new. Crossed knives: duel with a neighbor that no one survives. Stray shots at a child’s surprise party

 

then a sun-shower mocks their tiny cries. Badges saddle up in safety vests, crisscrossing the path of every black cat. Local ER Refused Trauma Victim, Say Activists. I have a funny feeling in my wrists,

 

an old auntie whispers, meaning bloodletting. One nightingale casts a spell and everyone licks their lips to not end up dead. Any face ever backhanded: back; jacked. Foal resting on a mound, sun

 

splicing its back. Six lobes in the white of an egg mean a baby is close. Don’t block your blessings, my pastor chides each week. I swallow watermelon seeds, walk till I’m full wattage, abuzz like spring

 

rooted its smiling face in my back. When I was a girl, I turned a little boy into a butterfly with my open palm—I couldn’t let him be. Do I descend from the eclipse or dead species? Childish qualms

 

will never surprise me: who wouldn’t kill for gold, pegs on a slipshod ladder; to be bulletproof; to feel like a celebration? Everyone walks in risk around my shadow: my neighbors in love, the maimed

 

angel on my corner, shooting off his mouth until his lips crack and blood lets. Each day I start anew, victim to my own survival. I om on the same plane as the ocean, fluent in the language of the weary

 

wrist, of the would-not-be-saved-by-any-specialist, and still dare to backfloat, to sing like a nightingale. I wear a vest, duel for saltlicks, take the horizon to my lips; blackout. On the shore,

 

crows like little knives surprise my ankles.

 

Zakia Henderson-Brown

Zakia Henderson-Brown is of starshine and clay lineage. She is a 2016 Poets House Emerging Poets fellow and has received additional fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Callaloo, and Cave Canem. Her poems have appeared in African American Review; Beloit Poetry Journal; No, Dear; North American Review; The Offing; Vinyl; and others. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013 and has completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Louis Armstrong House Museum. zakia currently serves as Associate Editor and Outreach Coordinator at nonprofit publisher The New Press and is on the board of the Brooklyn Movement Center. She lives in her native Brooklyn with furball Onyx.