Postcard to Phillis Wheatley Peters

They say they cannot find you, where you are
from, Senegambia or so, from a land where women eat 
gold to heal their skin and soften their gums.

Your voice none could avoid. You wrote
to surprise yourself; possessed by the spirit 
of language, you disentombed the stories 
lined in the cartilage of your eardrums.
Your mothers must have sat by rivers to listen 
to the way fish wept when currents flowed.

Strangeness followed you like a bee in labor.
Some white men sat you in a room and asked
if you wrote poetry; that a Black woman could place 
neat rhymes shocked their kindness.
Yes is all you must have said to keep gratitude 
in your teeth, anger in your wrist.

I want to say Thank you. I am a woman 
who is often not given a room to light 
fires and burn bias. I accept the layers 
of this skin. I desire myself as I would
a bag of hot rocks near my feet in winter.

Whoever you really are because you are 
Somebody, descendant of queens, griotess, 
that is what we shall call you! I can feel it
when the finger I left in my mother’s womb quivers.

Read more from Issue 19.1.