Cantrice Janelle Penn—Poetry

razed here

there’s a letter on the door.

the trees whose arms

have sheltered us for years

must come down

in the name of

“safety.”

i peel back the curtain and watch

a team of built Black men

just following orders

taking too many serrated edges

to tree roots

another one falls

the crack and force                 of air               feels like

the earth

moved———

but i must be mistaken

that was just

my heart.

lost

the gas station clerk does not understand

the hard lines around my english

when i ask him how to get back to

route 1 north.

i approach a blur

neonbeachshirtsixpackbeerbleachedhairfeatheredskinscorchedred

about how to get

north.

her eyes squint, scanning

my face, frame

as a guttural smoker’s laugh

throws her head back, and

“see, you in the country, now”

spins off her tongue

and that night

as the sky lost its blue

i learned that

country

still begins

with the sound

of

black bodies

pressed

into the

quiet                palms of

earth.

Cantrice Janelle Penn is a writer, decolonial copy editor, linguist and artist. Her upbringing was shaped by forked tongues, lottery dream books, and the steady waters of the Powhatan River in the US South. A VONA/Voices Fellow, Cantrice is also the recipient of the 2016 Firefly Ridge Literary Magazine Women’s Writing Award. Her work will appear/has appeared in several publications, including Kweli, Cunjuh, The Fem, Black Girl Dangerous, Sally Hemings Dreams, and After Ferguson, In Solidarity (Mourning Glory Publishing, 2015). Her writing can also be found at cantricejanellepenn.com.