Emily Mitamura
Constellate

Today I almost learned what my grandmother always tried to teach, that is
how best to not disappear. And yet
so long as I’m saying strange things, saving them like stardust
in the cells, let me tell you that

The way I know my body is through its hurts, a professor of dance
whispered yesterday, murmured to no one
as she splayed the cathedral arches
of her fine-boned feet like she was
re-laying the devoted scaffolding
of a city, its sky ankle-height and jointly haunted

by celestial couplings
and uncouplings. My grandmother’s hands,
were like her hands, both their skin
freckled to oblivion and
both their fingers knit tight enough by grief
to hold water. The fecund set

of each of their shoulders as they
bear their fractured fates are how I know,

I was meant to break this way, how I know
a cannon if collapsed can’t shoot
like some say it should, can no longer blast a hole
in the black of the night
its lambent outline
the shape of an upright woman.

_ _

Emily Mitamura is a doctoral student studying the brutalities of the everyday in post-coloniality, knowledge production, and race. Her research engages questions of memorialization, aesthetics, social death, and the secret things people hide in archives when no one else is looking. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Heart Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Lingerpost, AADORREE, and the walls of certain bathroom stalls among other places.

>> Back to Issue 22, 2019