Five Poems by Erica Dawson

Once you go Black (you know the rest)

In most photos of me as a child
I’m smiling. Two dimples and a gap
between my front teeth. I can think
of one departure—a school picture
around age four. I wouldn’t call it angry
or indignant. Maybe poker-faced, as if
I know something everyone else
doesn’t. I am born, Mom says,
stubborn. One foot lodged in her ribs
I kick it back when she massages her belly
to move it away. She says, Now aren’t you quite
the force to reckon with. I say, We are,
meaning just me. As soon as conception
she’s done her part and nature takes over
with all its splitting. The blastocyst.
The embryo. Perhaps that’s what I know
in the photograph:
I constellate into a sting of moods.
Ask me, Smile, watch my top lip curl in
against the gum, bearing all my teeth.
You can’t handle the sum of so much aura,
I tell a man. I’ve inherited the utmost.

* 

Love poem after starting to use the word neurodivergent

We underplay our love with words
like love. We mean viscera. Heart, belly.
When I’m on top of you
bent at the waist to get a taste
of your hairline’s sweat, let’s talk
of ganglia, occipital.
Testosterone and dopamine.
The more precise we are, the more
we trust the cost of us is worth
the tenderness of thin skins
easily bruising. Tell me again
how you saw me, once, deviate
from my body, how I left my form
for something far more faithful.

* 

Ovation

What should my body say, I ask myself
before getting my first tattoo. I choose
a big black sempiternam requiem
above my ass. I’m into requiem—
the word, the Mozart mass, the way he dies
before finishing. I sing along
to kyrie. I’m higher than the Lord.
Loud as a choir. Neighbors pound the walls.
Eventually somebody calls the police.
I am disturbance. Like it’s a dare
I sing harder. What if I don’t finish
this poem before dying, this poem about
my tramp stamp, singing, Jesus Christ the broad-
side could be scandalous. Someone fill in
the middle part—bend me over a desk,
the man behind me clueless when it comes
to Latin, clumsy in his lovemaking,
trying to reach around and grab my breasts
but not getting their rhythm. Get
the Best American ready. Then this: Proofread
my body for the loveliness of woman.
Highlight each fold and flaw and mole and sag.
Just put me in the casket naked. Turn
me over on my stomach. Read the skin,
the scar tissue which means the artist digs
too deep. Say I could’ve been the next
Sexton. Agree that I go on too long.

* 

At the doctor’s request

         after CAConrad

I stop caressing the ceiling.
Give my attention to the floor
arching its back like a cat leaning
into scratches. Cheek against
the hard-hearted I say Love ya
like you do when really it’s not
love but baby blue instead
of azure, warmth and not fervor.
The floor will hold my weight as water
does a leaf as long as I stay tense.
If I release my heft I’ll fall
fast as rocks. Skin is the heaviest
part of the body. Remove it
and the body still senses cold.
It’s not only our surfaces.
Trust muscles, too, can suffer pain.
Our aptitude for hurt goes all
the way into the marrow.
Agenda for tomorrow—press
my nose against the dining room
breakfront, keep my eyes closed, pretend
to have aphantasia and, watch,
tears form anyway. Nothing is real
lovely. The condensation of
my breath, on my whole face, kisses.

* 

Someone says write about the trees

and not myself. I write a poem
about white oaks, a clearing,
a fortress from rain’s taunting thrum.
Conspiracies of spring threaten. The brazenness
of azaleas. The poem is only black and white,
though, retro almost in its delicacy.
Clouds like lace curtains moving about a window
opened at night. A screaming fox. I title
the poem “Creation.” There’s an epigraph—
Donne’s little world made cunningly
of elements. To be a world you have
to have people, the dictionary suggests.
So I can’t help but add myself as God
saying to the fox, Run on. Run on.
It leaves the scene and then is never there.
Mushrooms down at the roots, one oak’s trunk rots.
This is what happens when you have a master.

*

Erica Dawson is a Black neurodivergent poet living in the Baltimore-DC area. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Orion, Revel, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals and anthologies.