Khadijah Queen
WebsiteYears: 2007, 2008, 2011
Biography
Khadijah Queen holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and a BA in English from University of Maryland. She is the author of a poetry collection, Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic 2008), and recent work appears or is forthcoming in jubilat, In Posse Review, Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks (Kore Press 2008), Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing (2009) and Best American Nonrequired Reading (Houghton Mifflin 2010) among many other journals and anthologies. Her second book, Black Peculiar, won the 2010 Noemi Book Award for Poetry, and is published with Noemi Press. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she curates the multicultural, multi-genre reading series Courting Risk.
Poem
LA KATRINA
Unravel your hurts at night.
Unfurl them, sacred flags,
And hoist them
Above your body, of course
You are alone.
Even when another's breath
Guides yours, glides
Airily into you, you are alone.
Believe there is only one.
Accept it as the most
Forgotten of all truths.
Even in the arms
Of marigolds, one. Of course
You are alone. Unravel
Your hurts at night.
Hoist them, little postcards
Against a blooming sky. Count them
As they float back down,
Cover you, fold them and tuck them
Like kisses under your skin,
Masks of afternoon,
Tender as the leaves of limes.
Of course you are alone.
There is no mercy
Except that which you grant yourself.
Even alone, even at night,
Your body covered in cempoalxochitl,
In the thriving pain that has unpacked you,
Tricked you, turned you inside
Out, there is no mercy except that
Which you grant yourself. Unravel your hurts
At night, your body singing black corridos.