I am a body
of ghost—
haint-kin cloaked
in earthen flesh

learning to see
my Self 
in the unyielding 
barrenness of my mother’s 
front yard.

The salted fault lines
become me. I bear
a trace of invasion
and reek
of a martyr’s will.

A tangle
of medicinal weeds
interrupts my molting 
descent.

Dandelion greens fuzz
up my apathy. A flower
dares itself to bloom
amongst my most quiet
scars.

When the rain comes,
I turn mud in my lover’s mouth.
Something fecund hums
through my blood

And maybe . . . this 
is the living. These 
would-be dead things in
the same place, the same time

that is 
my body. Ours. Not mine— 
unowned and fruited and
poor and black and ugly and Here

with you. I reach
a hand      out the wildness
And catch hold
a soft pulse
whispering:

                                                           Together, 
                                                      we nursed you
                                                      don’t you dare
                                                             give up

Copyright © 2023 by Ra Malika Imhotep. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 30, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“An armistice is an agreement made by opposing sides, a truce. This poem describes one of the many confrontations I’ve lived through between my own self-immolating desires and the strong, life-affirming will of my dead folks or ancestors who speak to me most clearly through sensation and most viscerally through experiences of intimacy with and within the natural world. I humbly offer this poem to the tradition of Black nature writers and Black feminist spiritualist poetics. Namely, I’m thinking with Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, and my contemporaries Marlanda Dekine, Makashya Tolbert, and Destiny Hemphill.”
—Ra Malika Imhotep