Photo by John Jennings on Unsplash
“My pen is a machete” -Terisa Siagatonu
My pen is a machete
I wield when the world puts its hand on my
Mouth
And says silence, swallow the blockage
of mourning in your throat
This rage
no one wants to experience from a BLACK woman
Hands around my throat for me to “hush”
What they don’t know is
I swallow these knives
Take them out and cut
Until there is only limb
And no apologies
No code switch
No screams for the babies I revive
from early graves
In this throat I
duel with spells and katanas
Until there is no paid leave for killers
Until there is no simple apology from intentional racists
Until history is a grave of the guiltys’ tongue
With all of the “I feared for my life’s”
As if they knew what it really is to fear for their life
The air gets wrenched out of my
voice box
Still -
I amplify it, sharpen each blade
I wield every unfinished scream like
throwing stars
until it severs the trauma
In all of our black and brown epitigenics
I pour blood and smear it
Like bwa kayman and use it to purify
all of the new ancestors
made ahead of their time
Until it is 1804 and slavery is a forgotten whisper
My eyes are the way I practice fencing in my silence - “fix that face” as it haunts you to see every century resounding through me
The weakness is showing
Your weak points
Revealed
When you tell me to
gulp down the trauma in silence
Know that I tend to a garden
of machetes
Lysz Flo is a, trilingual spoken word artist, author of fiction and poetry, member of The Estuary Collective, and podcast host of Creatively Exposed who released her poetry novel Soliloquy of an Ice Queen.