Breauna L. Roach – Creative Nonfiction

What to do after an article written about you by a white girl in your yoga class goes viral

or

On teaching yourself Egyptian yoga after you realize the rest of the class ain’t colored

–“Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”– Khalil Gibran

Some mornings you’ll consider salutations.

First
Sol: the sun.
Serotonin alarms ringing
before your lids even
crack.

Break.

You’ll remember that shells
and skulls
hold in the squish
of underdeveloped potential.

Don’t break.

You’ll weigh
and try to justify
nourishment
and cruelty.
Which one will you pick today?
How will you greet
this moment?

In body? Or mind? Or nah?
Nut: the sky.
Extend your hands like you reachin for
redemption.
Stretch your toes to the tips and wait.

Release. Relax.
tip your toes
lift your heals
over the shells.

Heal.

Soles are sometimes
painfully stretched
or
enclosed.
in shell
or
in the backs of brains
that cramp up in the  
white-dot-hot
or
that split moment between
awake and unconscious.

You may find yourself
trying to unscramble the feeling
that somebody
crept
into your dream
and switched
to some other
series
of stretches.

You may recall
some ancestral memory
of posing for paintings
on pyramids walls.

Yoga; to yolk or to bring together
the body
the blood
and the belief.
Look up
What to do
when all
your eggs
are white?

Whose eggs you tryna hatch, anyway?
And what pose will you
have
to hold
or
to fold into
to look under
your own ass and see
if them eggs are brown
like we supposed to be?

Breauna L. Roach is a native of Detroit, MI and the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers Association’s Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Detroit Institute of Art, Little Patuxent Review, and various other publications. Breauna is a Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow and the former Editor of CaKe: a Journal of Poetry and Art. She is currently a graduate instructor and MFA student at Emerson College.

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