origin poem
By Beasa Akuba Dukes
the terrifying rummaging rumble triple palpating through my chest, rings a song so green and blue it crawls outward and around the oblong curvature of my throat like crush-hued crawl. worm in the dirt, elongating, circling round and round until it discovers a sun-flicked seed. it eats in a spiraling motion, pushing the bright down its length. it becomes root—root turns tree—turns to climbed limbs.
i am climbing to the sky to drink the sun.
the ravaging yellow bloom pulses around my crawling reach. bursting open my prayer hands, i can feel the fire rattle its way down, down down deep into my dirt rumpled heart. it stammers through the roots, penetrating the brown gnarl.
i discover tender brown girl in the busted wreck, naked and edged with oceanic vibrational heat. she combs through the hole left there, a soft lit disaster were she like newborn becomes holy. and there in the haloed fume, still tucked, a bit of earth-star that she picks up with a vigor. still a seed seeking light.
she sucks the ruddy-yellow plume.
she turns it over, tiny tongue sucking at the peppery citrus and rust flavor.
her tongue falls out.
and out sprouts the boy.
the boy is an agitated magenta slump. bowed shoulders, shy bobbing head. he looks to the girl that birthed him. their eyes peering through the other.
the girl tilts her head, blood pouring from her birth canal. she tries to utter word. but the damage. but the damage.
the boy hears her anyway, the petaled-lilt she has jumps from her throat to his mouth. he spits open language in a voice that is his and beyond.
ive loved you since the day you were born she says blood gushing still all over her chest. she is warmed by this, her own words refracting. bouncing back, whirring under her skin. her bones delight, her skin delights. she is delighted to have born a boy that is also herself. she sees himself in her eyes—big earth-brown eyes moored by the split, wetted and hungry. yes. she is himself.
and the boy who never wanted to be sobbed and sobbed. he was reluctant to be so removed from the sunken internal. he misses the wet mound that is the brown girl, her tender sun-rocked mouth. he never wanted to shape. but here him was—bodied and missing his center.
and the girl, feeling like a fledged-mother, grabs the boy by the rocking, knotty arms, opens her mouth wide wide wide
and eats him whole.
the boy, happy to have been engulfed, returning, rolls down the brown girl’s tender insides, her worm-slick throat and finds he can see with her illumed brown eyes. he sees the new-bud green hum, now puckered with gold, now hot with sky and purple. he seems himself in her. he sees herself in him. he sees there is a heart that has been nudged open, slit to wound, growing in shape, convulsing.
and the girl with no tongue begs now birth me new from the inside.
the boy does as she asks. does as he asks.
he jams his head into her head, their skulls conjoining. he crams his arms into her arms like sleeves, he nudges apart her legs and dips around her tender vagina and finds he rather likes the fleshed warmth and sinks them deeper as he folds into her. he wills his bones to her bones which are his bones. their bloodlines interlock.
past becomes future—future becomes past.
and they subsume the other.
they become new thing—
they tongue open the birth-wound and slit out the access of teeth.
they speak
we
Beasa Akuba Dukes (they/them) is a twenty-seven year old, black non-binary person. They graduated Longwood University with a BA in English. They have also graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College with an MFA in Creative Writing. They have published in Guide to Kulchur Creative Journal Issue No. 4, PANK Online Magazine, Polychrome Ink Journal, GrubStreet, No Tokens, Foglifter Journal, Paper Nautilus, and PRISM International. They focus-write and play around with gender, race, sexuality off-pulse spirit stuff, and the body to explore identity.