We spun light our young bodies
from the edge of Grandma’s yard to the middle of the street,
rolling heat waves. We tossed the fruit of that loquat tree
at one another and sucked the smooth pits. We, flesh and blood,
Grandma’s brood. All summer we sweated. All summer we played
until the hot night sky was full of moon.
Always watching. Always witness. Silent witness, that moon.
She could testify to the way we was light in our bodies—
how high our knees sprang when we played
as children in the middle of that safe street.
Sucked our sweet, skinned knees. Sucked salty blood
and hung like ripe fruit off thin branches of Grandma’s loquat tree.
Memories, held like breath in the limbs of that loquat tree,
recall themselves every new moon
and pulse through the blackest night. Blood
remembers. Blood won’t forget our bodies
those hot summers, in the middle of the safe street,
consumed and spinning with nothing but play.
It is well known that these streets don’t play.
To the bodies in the sky, to the loquat tree
it is well known, the things that occur in these streets.
It was waxing gibbous, meaning half a moon
that night you died. That half-rock half-lit your body.
Cast light upon and glimmered sapphire the lake of blood
which emerged around you and stained the feet and hands of your flesh and blood,
circled struck silent moan. This terrible tragic play
were we huddle in the night around our beloved slain bodies,
the cops saying stand back and only the night and the loquat tree
witness you fall right where the treetops break and allow the moon
to spill its half-light perfectly upon your beloved body in the street
in front of Grandma’s house. No one witnessed nothing on that street.
All we know is blood.
All we will ever know is moon.
And even now, the little ones play
and pluck sweet loquats from Grandma’s tree.
So, how long will I write poems about your body?
How long will our bodies live and die on that street
where, in the roots of the loquat tree, breathes our blood—
seeps from its flesh and plays in the street under the moon?
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Contributor’s Notes
Alicia Mosley (she/her) is a poet, fiction writer, mother, and community educator. She is a recipient of the Hurston Wright Foundation, Community of Writers, and the Gluck Arts Fellowships. Alicia’s creative work explores the magical labor of mothering while black and mothering black children. Her work honors the grief just as it celebrates the familial survival and perseverance in the ever-present threat of violence and anti-Blackness. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Sun Magazine, BLAC Zine, Pacific Review and An Anthology of Non-Conformism: Rebel Wom!n Words, Ways and Wonders. Alicia currently resides in Riverside, California and is working on her first novel, Mothering Pound.
