Member-only story
I’m alive
though life behaves like a deadly assassin in the worst of times, trying to murder my brown skin and permanently close my brown eyes — with foot soldiers screaming of death and taxes whilst whispering of colonial lies, I lean back dodging bullets, folding and unfolding like a multiverse, quantum leaping where the lines bleed between the ink and the page — sipping lemonade, quenching old souls, mining diamonds from lumps of coal
I’m alive
this much is true, I will frequently swim against the tide, through rivers of blood as long as the Nile, propelled by waves of ancestral pride, as salted — ammonia water stings my eyes, and I drown a little with every breath and sigh, but — doesn’t every dream stand on every nightmares shoulders? Willing what can be imagined into existence, watching imperfect strangers emerging from shadows cast across the diaspora — becoming perfect allies
I’m alive
a fire burning, stoked by the wild wind, blowing through the days and nights, with a huff and a puff roaring from the diaphragm — exploding at the top of my lungs, spitting balls of flames destroying the house that Jack built — then making use out of the rain and these ashes, building something lit of my own — in my name, written in the delicate coils of my crowns DNA, a million teardrops in the ocean — find a way back to life again
I’m alive
