zakia henderson-brown


The Body, Losing Its Borders


Before his mouth formed muscle enough
to pull words together, before
a full set of teeth, my three year-old father
saw Emmett Till’s northern skull
pulped open: his first lucid memory.
His southern town was gun-split, swollen shut
with slow-tongued mobs whose throats retched red
with epithets, skin bound by tradition.
Alive, James Chaney was the whisper
in a fringe town’s trees, twinkle
in the nation’s eye. By the time federal divers fished
the Mississippi for his flesh
he had already turned to spook
& their nets ran so fat with bones—
disfigured by age & crime—
they had to send some back.
That same summer, long before my father’s voice
evened with bass, he waded that river
nearly dyed red, cautious of swallowing
even small drops of history.
By the time he was six feet
with headlights turned north, something guttural
something almost animal itching his twang
Mississippi was already worked
into my genes, a nascent veined tick.

zakia henderson-brown (she/her) is the author of What Kind of Omen Am I, winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Cate Marvin. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, was a 2016 Poets House Emerging Poets fellow, and has received additional fellowships and support from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her poems have appeared in New Daughters of Africa (Amistad), Adroit, African American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Little Patuxent Review, North American Review, Washington Square Review, Vinyl, and others. She currently serves as a senior editor at nonprofit book publisher The New Press. The nonfiction books she’s edited have been recognized by the Pulitzer Prize administration, PEN America, Booklist, Boston Review, The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, Kirkus, and Library Journal. She lives in her native Brooklyn.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023