I This haven, mossed and quaint, is not heaven— in the summer it sleets black doves, I swear the plank it pours them.
A muted choir gurgles, beneath the mud near the Black Ash Tree where snakes with lies stuffed down their endless throats hang, hooked and ready.
The toes of the low marsh drain and lilies pop up each flee season— headstones for the bodies consumed.
II
As a haunt I am skinless, thick-less muddied, naked and mapped.
The dipper carved into forearm bone.
Not humbled, I am soring. Not missed, I am dead.
III
I hear White Mountains have left their peaks and valleys have taken the high road. Hot springs have drained themselves of heat and water, being water, still claims to clean—to purify.
The marsh being the marsh holds bodies—its prey under rocks and between the fingers of twigs.
Me being ghost offer myself.
My naked body baptizes water— it can scrub sin from many things, but not this. Not this.
is an award-winning author and poet who writes for both children and adults, often referring to herself as a folklorist. She is also an herbalist and practices Hoodoo (an African American folk-magick practice). McBride was an assistant professor for a decade at The University of Virginia and James Madison University before she started writing full time. Her poetry has been published in several literary magazines including Ploughshares, Blackbird, Willow Springs Magazine, On Being, Rust & Moth and many others. Her debut young adult novel, Me (Moth) was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the 2022 Coretta Scott King/ John Steptoe Award for new talent, among many other accolades. Her sophomore novel, We Are All So Good At Smiling, was critically acclaimed garnering 5 starred reviews. McBride’s middle grade debut, Gone Wolf, was also well received and went on to win the LA Times Book Award in Children’s Literature. Her adult poetry collection, Thick with Trouble, was called, “a beautiful web of interconnected pieces relating to her identity as a Black woman in the modern era,” by the Harvard Crimson.
McBride earned her MFA with a concentration in poetry from Emerson College in Boston and went on to intern at the Furious Flower Poetry Center where she helped to put on programs honoring Black poets and writers like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. Amber McBride believes in magick, Hoodoo, ghosts and all the things you can’t see, but most of all she believes in you!
