Siobhan Jean-Charles graduated with her Bachelor's from Salisbury University and is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University. She is the blog editor for The Shore Poetry and her work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Tusculum Review, Furrow, Atlanta Review, Broadkill Review, and elsewhere.
1983, IN THIS CASE
—after Jean-Michel Basiquat
the cranium is angular, with constellation gears
churning and a hungry mouth full of green teeth.
Cobalt seeps past Baron Samedi’s skull
smile. This is not memento mori,
it dates back one hundred and eighty years ago.
He restitches with Catherine Flon’s
blue for the Black and red for the mulatto. Charcoal
black brushstrokes of ancestors that glow
dark against the Caribbean sea, under the warmth of captured halos.
VISITING THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART'S AFRO-ATLANTIC SLAVERY EXHIBIT
I walk in, hands clasped as if a rosary weaves between my knuckles.
In the hallways next to 19th century French paintings,
I know better than to expect a museum to fill
the holes of history. Still, I pause by the man’s photo as if his frame
were an altar–to walk past would be sacrilege. His spine curves
to the camera, skin thorned open, scars trellis shaped.
When the man in the The Scourged Back was enslaved,
he was called Gordan. When his portrait reached
white northerners, they began to call him Peter.
He was twice branded by a name that wasn’t his own,
baptized with a saint’s name. What do I call him?
Around the corner, Toussaint Louverture’s slant
in his saddle, his horse a cloud soaring away from grass
that leaps to its tail like a flame. When Haitians ended
slavery, the French didn’t want the freed to have
their last names, so we turned endings to beginnings:
Baptiste, Charles, Pierre, each syllable searing
into a new shape. Victoria Santa Cruz cries
¡yo soy NEGRA! Her voice ricochets off
the walls. A painting flashes into the corner
of my eye, a marketplace sprawl—
their balanced baskets, sandcastle skin and mustard walls
the same fastened to my aunt’s living room, or my childhood
home. A Vodou tapestry ignites with sequins—
Erzulie stands, cinnamon-skinned and crowned with a moon.
When she takes a baby in her arms, she looks
like the Virgin Mary—except
the snake curls around her ankles, instead of crushed under her feet.
AUGUST 12, 1988
“I don’t remember.”
—Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1985 Interview
Because a millionaire is left
in taxi cab exhaust fog, because he sits
paint-splattered, locked and cross
-legged and told you he was refused
and you say, we can’t boycott everything.
Because his tongue aches for griot
when he eats caviar. Because he runs
a line through Hank Aaron—your eyes
crawl beneath and you wonder why
AA is scrawled over, because you can’t
stand the idea that he hides
a name from you. Because you ask if
he’s angry, because you even ask.
Because he Renaissanced himself
and learned with an anatomy
book, because he did not stare and made art
galleries and museums his schools,
because you call a poet a graffiti artist.
ARTICULATION
I study the anatomy of a cliche,
pick it apart and hear it hum
in my hand—so I can give
you a poem you haven’t
seen before. I read my favorite
journal over the phone, each line
could be in French because
you only want to hear my voice,
let the shape of each vowel
caress you to sleep. I’m going
to say them first, the three words hung
on my tongue like a Baroque painting.
I want to tell you without moving
my mouth, even if you don’t know
what a pantoum is, that I pick
couplets for you like tulips.
TO EARTH
Bring your ocean across
these sheets, feel the rhythm
of our orbits roaming
into one. I could be your moon
and pull your tide, sip water
between your thighs.
I’ll earn each ascent
and fall of your breath,
learn your body. I know
your desire because it’s mine—
I know about the danger in being
known when I gleam against the night.
If you hold me at my peak, there is no
where for either of us to return. Look
at each bedrock crack and crater
in my face. See the cliffs?
See the whispers of water? Kiss
your shadow against my frozen lakes.
I VISIT MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER
—after Richard Blanco’s “My Father in English”
before her birthday party. All I knew
about her was my sister was named after her,
partially, given the middle name Ursula
while the rest of us had Anne. And so
I pictured her as an octopus. We never drove up
except for those few summers she approached
one hundred, a pilgrimage to rain
golden confetti and sail shining balloons
with every passing year, to hold
our breaths on her inhale over lit candles.
DaVinci’s The Last Supper
hung in her kitchen and she sat,
hair sea-foam white and thin
against her scalp among plastic
furniture that clung to the back
of my thighs. Instead of a sea creature,
she sat small and brittle as driftwood.
I couldn’t understand living
for a century, how her mind
could hold so much history.
Most people don’t have a great-
grandmother. Most people don’t
have a well of memory. I imagined
her past as black and white negatives,
moments I could only look at in a book.
She closed her hand over mine,
only spoke in Kreyol. I tried to listen,
to slip into every syllable,
wade in the current
of her voice. Her cadence,
the sounds humming against
her teeth and deep in her throat
were ones that I could only mimic
in my mouth with the handful
of phrases I knew. On the wall,
Jesus spread his hand palm up,
the way the priest does but
this gesture isn’t in the Bible.
My grandma stood behind me
and no one translated the final
words my great-grandmother spoke
to me, as her thumb moved
across my knuckles,
water over stones,
her fingers grasping
my wrist that was
as narrow as hers.
I nodded, punctuated
every few sentences
with okay, as if I understood.