CONTENT WARNING: i had this dream of a memory i forgot sometime ago… like most of my dreams there is sexual assault and mention of rape

magic pulled me into a shop. i walked by first then floated in. when the door shut behind me he asked if i had been here before. i responded no, in fact i just realized i came in at all. 

i looked around tried on this air jordan crop jacket and orange drop crotch pants. 

sitting on stone stools bare feet gripping mandela rugs, we talked of spirit and colonizers and pain and suffering. he showed me his art. i read him my poetry. i held a buddha statue carved of nigerian wood as if it were my baby. i noticed one painting occluded by inflammed lace and i copied the man at its base. his out stretched arms and eyes trained ahead. he took a picture. i smiled. then i mirrored the women, her eyes were downcast trained on me. i return her gaze and let my arms fall like hers open and round and framing belly. i begin to meet her gaze and search her eyes for – but he calls me to look at him. look at the camera. so i do and smile. 

he is an elder born in angola. he could be my great grandfather. he lit incense and called upon his ancestors as i played the drums. three mothers stand beside me each bearing child on their back.

i feed them without calling them. he gifts me waist beads and explains a ritual i don’t want to detail but i agreed in spite of my bodies knowledge. i do this often. i go along with it just to see what will happen. is it morbid curiosity if i am never surprised. is it the grooming i endured as symptom of being female bodied exotically fetishized since before i had hips. white women are praised for chastity but foreigners are playthings for white mens darkest fantasies. And men darkened by layers of unrelenting sun have no right to fantasy in the trade of labor. darkened men hunt in spirals. Straight lines are for destination and destiny was stripped from foreign shores shipped alongside lucrative cargo of mothers wombs and fathers hands and childrens tongues.

 i begin to dissasociate preparing to watch it all unfold from afar. this is not the first time and i am unconsciously practiced in the art of surviving it. i forgot how to walk away. i could have left then when he was preparing the beads. but i forgot i can. im sure my body begged me to leave but my mind was already blank. 

habit had me stay and had me go milky eyed and not cry. its wrong to say i wanted it bc i didn’t bc its perverse but i like to hurt and look the pain in the face. i like to massage scars by reliving old experiences that i let turn new again. i pick at the scab. i let it bleed again. i let it happen. the trickling of blood is more familiar than the stream of a tear. 

i don’t know. he touched me and i was too shocked and sad and frozen. and i remember the audre lord poem of the father that impregnanted his daughters 15 and 16. and they cried into mothers bosom asking if father is father or lover, if mother is mother or rival, how can they love the twins of their fathers seed like their mother loves them… ill read the poem to you later. 

i don’t cry and im not angry bc its the world we walk its the world I’ve walked and i do not fight but surf it. i just can’t hold anger nor think its unfair or whatever anymore. im so past that rage.  ive accepted this world over and over again. nature is as cruel as it is beautiful. i don’t think im weak, maybe just a little masochistic. a tree that does not bend through the storm will surely break… so is strength not flexibility is weakness not rigidity? and it is pain that leads to… it wasn’t rape. we didn’t fuck. but his gaze raped me and so did lingering hands and  prying fingers. was it rape when i felt him inside of me.  i wonder if there was a world before colonization and industrialized cruelty and war when there was no rape. is rape natural bc nature is cruel. was there community where an act couldn’t exist bc it was so unfathomable to the way they lived. ducks rape each other i read about it once and their screwdriver dicks that prove their species sexual violent history. when an animal rapes it is natural perhaps. or unconscious urge… it is what it is.  but when an elder touches me it is indoctrination by a system that kills the mother so men force their ignorance upon children instead making them hold it. audre lorde has a poem about that too. i’ll read it to you sometime. and when i stay still and watch from above, that too is survival. i didn’t leave and i didn’t cut the waist beads. i don’t cut them off bc i like my scars and opening old wounds. i like the feeling of oozing blood because it reminds me of home. i don’t know. a powerful act to give me strength and stability disguising a hurting man in a hurting system grieving by inflicting more grief it all just spirals in on itself. it spirals into sister wombs. and i like to look at them and think of this act and force myself to sit in it bc its real and feeling is my fetish. bc when i sit in it i know this grief is not my own but one that every being shares and a burden beared in bars caging womb. i feel less lonely when i do not blame him nor myself but the polluted air that drove us here. away from motherlands to survive americas and i watch the memory over like a movie. from a birds eye. i can’t eat the popcorn tho, i’m not hungry. its a story ive lived again and again as my sisters and my mothers and the young trees reaching for sun without the shield of old growth forest. its gross but i grew in sewage.

before i left he told me to take any bracelet i liked. i was drawn to a red threaded one with a single black bead in the shape of a closed hand. not a fist, its thumb was on the side. he told me in latin countries fathers put it on babies to protect them. was i ever a baby needing protection how could that time pass before it even happened. where did all the children go? if the mothers are dead who is pregnant?