Marlanda Dekine
Marlanda Dekine is the author of Thresh & Hold (Hub City Press, 2022) and i am from a punch & a kiss (unnamed LLC, 2017). Her work has been anthologized in What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People and Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice in an Entangled World. She is a South Carolina Arts Commission Spoken Word/Slam Poetry fellow, Castle of our Skins Shirley Graham Dubois Creative in Residence, Tin House scholar, and Palm Beach Poetry Langston Hughes fellow. Her poems have been set to music by Omar Najmi and Douglas Boyce, sung by Kelley Hollis, and published by the Poetry Foundation, Orion Magazine, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She received a Governor’s Award from South Carolina Humanities and the New Southern Voices in Poetry Prize, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. She is the founder of Speaking Down Barriers.
field notes
she still got you and your mama’s
jesus walking through the blood
vessels in her neck as she sings
i swear i can hear a piano
playing “here but i’m gone” by curtis mayfield
inside her mouth coming from her daddy’s side
heed
the fields
inside her
she racializes every city
you take her body into
she cannot wait to return to south carolina
some afternoons she finds a mirror
to see her sisters’ faces
and tell them she’s sorry
she makes an ocean of our classroom floor
every time she remembers her hands
her neck crooks
she turns yellow as squash stuck in blood memory
tells me her body hurts
last night she dreamt she drowned
in front of everyone she loves
not one of you could swim
said she felt death come for her reckless
as your daddy reverend moses in his blue cadillac
slippery around any corner
said she doesn’t feel saved
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