After Natasha Marin’s Red Lineage
my name stumbles ups the stairs

climbing towards grace, an ascending arc of red and gold
my mother's name mends shards back to glass

melts them down with the heat of a thousand hearts,

an aged and forgiving red
my father's name lives in a spoonful of shadows

hungering for a cloud that will rain red
follow the seedlings and you will see

my name become a little kite dancing in the wind,

stand still under the cicadas’ summer song

and see my mother's name strut

to a living and slowly dying beat of red

breathe in the fire’s flicker and my father’s name

tending to the embers collapsing red.
I come from a people known for speaking without saying,

for spitting the shine on their boots & stomping blackness

into the heavens.
Daemond Arrindell is our Poet in Residence for August. Previously: Disbelief, and Costume