My name is Aja Monet and this poem is called Castaway.

I did not want to write a poem full of corpses.

So I wrote a sacred pink blue sky jeweled on the horizon.

Laughter as the loudest star sleeps.

Humor hugs every ache whole,

how heavy heads lay after a long day in the humid heat,

Caribbean moonsize, and joyous dreams.

I did not wish to speak of what should not be spoken so

silence breathe into all the words a haunting. I come from a language that does not write itself.

Our ancestors speak hurricane.

A thunder tongue, shivering tides and a petty revenge.

The Mid-Atlantic is a vexed auntie rattling rivers and roofs ready for reckoning,

knocking at the chest of men.

On the other side of now, there is a door where we return. Every island is a hip

swaying between here and there afloat in the dance to belong, rocking in the

arms of the edge, where the sea is an emerald flag and palm trees praise the air.

Every shore is an altar of remembrance, embraced on purpose pickney of the sunray where prayer trembles the light or how a storm retreats.

We marvel and move eternal, unformed and unlost hips, hollowing elbows flapping like fanning flames, bare feet chant in the

sand or in a concrete jungle.

Love taps quake the nape of the earth's neck where daughters of diaspora dream and inherit journeys of

flesh where a smile is also a scar or how my grandfather came to see about us years after he died, wearing my

uncle's face, dimpled and shining eyes like two wet black beans baptized by a spirit, charming man in all he was checking

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