Porsha Olayiwola
a writer, performer, educator, and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas; an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion; named by GK100 as one of Boston’s Most Influential People of Color; Artistic Director at MassLEAP, a literary non-profit organization in Massachusetts serving youth artists; author of I Shimmer Sometimes, Too (Button Poetry) and the current poet laureate for the City of Boston
HAD MY PARENTS NOT BEEN SEPARATED AFTER
MY FATHER’S TRAFFIC STOP, ARREST, AND
DEPORTATION FROM THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA
after Jesmyn Ward
we might all be sitting about the pink kitchen table with the white legs. my father, a taxi driver, might have come home late in the evening with two large chuck steaks bloodied, red, fresh, best he could bring. he might have seasoned the meat, his thick brown hands gently letting loose salt how god did earth. he might lay a sheet of cayenne over the flesh — a homeland conquered by sun, a fire gouged between cheeks, eyes watering a flag of surrender. my father might have survived the night to serve us.
my father, with his skin shiny, his head smooth, might have built me a treehouse in the front yard, with tools from his orange metal box. and my mother, sharp, discerning, the quiet keeper of sacred emblems, our family’s marrow, might have never let me climb in that tree house because as it were, gunshots littered our streets the way the dead plagued a hospital.
had my father not been deported, he and my mother might have had another child. it’s likely they’d build a new back porch and have a garden with peppers just like our neighbor, ronny. my mother might grow a row of cabbage, all green and light, tight and balled like fists. it’d be a wednesday and my father, my brother and i might whisk our bikes down lake shore drive, or pitch a tent in the back yard or watch terminator or the movies where eddie murphy played a cop from beverly hills. my father may have been filled with enough cracks in his face to cause an earthquake of laughter to ripple through our home.
dusk, with the light gleaming in from our living room windows, i imagine he might step into one of my mother’s bright silk dresses. the purple one. he’d squeeze his feet into her pumps and prance around the house he bought her as a gift years before. my mother might have giggled at my father’s silliness. he may have sauntered over to her with his palm down and his wrist bent as though he was expecting to have his hand captured by a long-awaited love.
my mother might have said something like man, if you don’t take off my good dress, you finna buy me another one. and my mother may have not really been mad. and you could tell by how she cocked her neck back and to the side, alabaster gleaming a curve into her face. she might have smiled through the threat and my father might have held her around the waist with one arm and pulled her into his chest, how i do the woman i love when i miss her so much it aches
and my parents may have kissed, maybe on the lips, and my father, full, may have reached his hand to my mother’s string of beads, removed it, and placed the necklace over his own head to lay along his chest. her earrings may dance from his lobe. and my father, a man who gave like a tree, might have lined his fingers over my mother’s tombed heart, and swayed his hips to its cadence.
© 2019 Porsha Olayiwola, from I Shimmer Sometimes, Too: Poems by Porsha Olayiwola (Button Poetry)