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.
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