our own names

okra, pickled just the way you like it,
             in the jar on the top shelf. oranges
in the ochre clay bowl you made right there

on the counter. clove tea brewing stovetop
             & there’s an orison that my mama
taught me, metronoming ’gainst my orbital

bones. orbiting around my occipital.
             come through. let’s be each other’s oracles.
we can hold hands, craft a shrine in the gap

of our palms, in the ocean of our breaths
             at the shore of our oil-shined flesh. listen:
this is my oath to you. i’m devoted

to you, the people, my folks, my kindred—
             not to the state. & i belong with you—
not to the state. our love is ordained

by the Black ordinary & spectacle,
             our wayward waymaking. we are the more
gathered together here in our own names

calling on otherwise. serenading
             otherwheres. singing we already here—
come through

Copyright © 2023 by Destiny Hemphill. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 24, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This is a love poem to my kindred, my beloveds. While writing, I was thinking a lot about how the state, through its institutions of policing, prison, industrialized ‘care,’ surveillance, marriage, and other management strategies, tries to capture Black life, proliferate Black death, and reduce ‘love’ and ‘care’ to mechanisms of governance. I wanted to write against that. I wanted to write towards a commitment to operations of Black care, which necessarily push beyond and against the state, as theorized by [Black studies scholar] Calvin Warren: Operation Black Care.”
—Destiny Hemphill