Feature image credit: @loveonpages
In Black Girl, Call Home Jasmine Mans pulls at the readers heart strings. In every poem, the reader learns what it’s like to live as a queer Black woman and the barriers faced along the way. She records triumph, agony, and above all shows how to achieve acceptance, accord, and ease while finding your way home.
DEAR EX LOVER
Dear ex lover,
I promise
I’ll stop chasing
your memories in my dreams.
I’ll stop bringing your name up
over cups of coffee, muffins,
and loneliness.
I’ll marry a man and lay my heart
on his chest like red roses
on mahogany caskets,
and I’ll have his daughter.
She’ll have eyes reminding me
God still believes in second chances.
If she ever falls in love with a woman
I’ll love bravery down her spine.
I’ll be reminded of all the times
we loved like there were expiration dates
tattooed on our inner thighs.
I’ll tell her to watch out
For women whose silhouettes
remind her of roadblocks.
To run when she kisses dead skin
that reminds her of dead ends.
If she ever comes home
with eyelids like cracking levees,
bruised kneecaps, and a heart full
of question marks,
I will hold her
like my mother never held me.
I’ll clasp her face in my palms
like the New Testament on Judgment Day.
I will remind her that true love
is the passion that allows you
to do the right thing.
And no human is strong enough
to play coaster
to a half-empty heart.
Dear ex lover,
if my daughter ever feels
like she’s alone,
as if her heart isn’t a hand-me-down
fabric pulled out of the depths
of her mommy’s closet,
I’ll remember your name,
and mumble it under my breath
when she asks me, what did I say
I’ll tell her,
“I know what it feels like
to drag a woman out of a cold war,
then being too worn to clean up
the battlefield it has made of you.”
I will tell her,
“Your heartbeat sounded like gun’ shells
tripping over battered cement.”
I will tell her,
I know what it feels like
to just want someone to remember you.
And apologies are like oxygen masks
on hijacked planes,
forgive yourself
before you dare
you forgive the person
lying next to you.
Excerpted from BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME published by arrangement with Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Jasmine Mans.
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