Self-Portrait as the Middle Passage
BY ELYSE THOMAS
After Tom Feelings’s The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo
I.
There are faces in the waves,
foaming green-gray at the shore.
They keep coming.
They keep coming back
to me. I am their witness.
They keep me in the hold
of their gaze.
In the water,
I am all skin, liquid dark.
When I submerge,
we do not know
whose body belongs to who.
Am I Atlantic?
Am I the naked I became
to enter the mouth
of an ancestor? Am I the song
about a river they dreamed
they would return to?
Was I that river
once? Twice? The body
and the memory of it.
Am I the limbs
that ghost the air?
How did I wreck here?
Is my belly bloated
like a boat?
Is that why I hold
my stomach as if
it is trying to get away
from me? My bandage-hands
failing to stop the spill.
Am I afraid of splitting
the wound stitched
with salt? Am I the wound
that won’t heal?
I am
what was salvaged
from the passage.
The sea storms out my throat.
The water remembers my face.
II.
My face, a memory
of kin ripped away
by translucent hands.
When they bound us,
tried to cut our tongues,
we spat back salt,
sang a song from the deep
of our bellies to the shallow
waters of our throats.
They ain’t realized
we travel like a yawn
between the mouths
of time. We keep
the world awake.
We spine the sea,
we rib the wreck
for the forgotten,
we tongue the salt-
water for names
gone missing.
In the tides, surrounded
by so many bodies
that we become one
body, made and unmade
and remade by the rocking,
the rolling, we are chained
to a history we cannot escape.
In every dream, I am drowning.
I wake in a sinking ship
headed toward the bottom,
I am trying to swim, I am—
Am I remembering wrong?
In every dream, I am moving
through water, lifted
by an ancestored anchor
that docks me at the shore.
A momentary exhale of relief.
Crests of light cast
across my cheeks.
There are waves in the faces.
