Nwenna Kai
Nwenna Kai lives in Philadelphia with her family. She has been published in Obsidian, Heart and Soul Magazine, and Aji Magazine. She teaches writing at West Chester University and Community College of Philadelphia.
Cuts
(for alma)
when you told me you wanted to cut yourself, I wanted to cut whoever made you want to cut yourself in half/but then I realized that I may be cutting a lot of people/ a lot of isms/ a lot of past, unearthed, ideologies that have chiseled you into thinking that wrist cutting is a hobby for the lonely who think this is the only way out of this/and this that you think is harder than living is what really makes me angry because you are
mother/warrior daughter/stranded wife/loyal student/soft lover/third world woman/delicate girl/sassy child/delectable dreamer/and maybe you are even poet/who writes to save herself from her own hands/ but you are more than a cutter
I think about how you came to me/rushed and searching for my eyes to mother your wrists/rolling words off your tongue singeing the air/depressed you said and pregnant/no anti-blues meds/baby can’t have any/doctors gave me therapy and asked me weird questions like what color do you feel like and how many times have you aborted your children and why have you any insurance and where is your husband and do you know English
and words dizzied you into storms so vast
that even rain seemed to be killing you
but why the wrists?
were you sculpting something?
have you thought about what your wrists would look like/sliced patterns of mango tan flesh mixing blood and veins spilling fetus screams/ have you thought about fetus (girl or boy) feeling half open and still alive/have you thought about this unborn spirit that would have to reverse itself eventually and come through another vagina just to find its way back to itself/ have you thought about the poems that you have written and trashed
why are you in such a hurry to dry the blood from yourself?
but mostly why the wrists?
were you writing poems?
making language with skin and blood?
were you sculpting something?
was there a war begging for breath from your skin?
if cutting is what the lonely do
then we warrior woman girls have done it on every moon cycle – fat and full
we have walked into rooms of poetry putting our wombs back into place
stealing back our vulvas from treacherous beds
stitching our bones and tears together to make quilts
we warrior woman girls have driven ourselves so red in the body
just to ask for someone’s eyes upon us
©2021 West Trade Review
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