by Alafia Nicole Sessions
His breath in my braids means
it was probably a girl. A boy
said the psychic eight years ago,
yet we didn’t believe. When I wake up,
emptied, the grief in my solar plexus
crowns, a wildfire set to un-map me.
I need bodywork, need healer’s hands
to sugar-shine my chakras, dulled
by the rupture in my cosmos.
But touch too soon might
force me from this body.
I need a tether. I take the tulsi,
ask its spirit to be a bridge. I take
the mushrooms, lie down on the earth,
letiteatmebackintobeing.
On their free fall toward gauze,
tears mark invisible incision plat
along the drowned valley of my face.
How easy it is to lose myself
in your folklore, my sanity
slippery as a clot.
· · ·
[Alafia Nicole Sessions is a black poet, writer and mother living in Atlanta. She currently works as an educator, actress, herbalist and birthworker. Alafia’s debut poetry collection, Nine Drops of Turpentine, was chosen by Victoria Chang as the winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize, and will be published by University of Georgia Press in March 2027. Winner of the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, she is grateful for support from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole and Sustainable Arts Foundation.]
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