You Were Sleeping So Well by Aïcha Martine: A Poet in Residence, Day Two
You don’t remember the first time you saw, really saw the
chroma of your skin; but you remember what it felt like to
want to rub its sootiness from the canvas underneath. The day
those planes collided in New York, and they pulled all of you
wailing out of school, you knew the giddy games were over.
Not Christian + White = not from here after all. You were
sleeping so well, courting post-Y2K frenzybliss, the thrill
of technophobia a barometer, what formidable days to come.
Even when lost on you, back then, you joined all choruses:
all hail Sean and Shawn, the Napster kings! You yourself,
queen of your microcosm, you were not somewhere you came
from. You were one of 6 billion, and Pluto was a planet, and
“them” meant anyone, but never you. You don’t remember
the texture of its symmetry, you don’t remember how the
world, holding itself together by the tension of something
promising, brought you to your feet slanted. Beautiful torpor
era, vantage point romances, 90s girl buying into the myth
of safety, shut-eyed through the night; though you were
sleeping so well you didn’t realize the myth, they weren’t
selling it to kids who looked like you. Even when that boy in
maternelle called you NEGRO, even when speaking anything
but English to your mother attracted buzzing glares in public,
even when the nice ones asked did you come by boat and from a
hut, you were sleeping so well the ugliness, split through its
pulpous middle, looked peripheral, hazy, unfocused. A concept,
like the death of grunge. You were sleeping so well you did
not realize everyone else had woken up, judging you the way
you would someone who’d been kicking in bed, disrupting
everything, although you yourself could not remember what
you'd done. Suddenly you were goldfish in fishtank, no longer
salmon fighting upstream, or whatever the hell else they told
you as consolation for having been born Pisces. Suddenly they
showed you yourself and it was blasphemous to look away; and
“them” was you, and you were one, not 6 billion, and you were
where you came from, and the texture of the world matched its
jagged symmetry. You were sleeping so well as if you knew,
it would be heavy-lidded whiles before you slept right again.
………………..
A. Martine is a trilingual writer, musician and artist of color who goes where the waves take her. She might have been a kraken in a past life. She's an Assistant Editor at Reckoning Press and a co-Editor-in-Chief and Producer of The Nasiona. Her collection AT SEA was shortlisted for the 2019 Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize. Some words found or forthcoming in: Déraciné, The Rumpus, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Metaphorosis, South Broadway Ghost Society, Gone Lawn, Rogue Agent, Boston Accent Lit, Porridge Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Figure 1, Willawaw, Tenderness Lit.
Twitter: @Maelllstrom