Notes on the State of Virginia, IV

Poetry
Written By Safiya Sinclair

Love carved me in stained glass
like a new tattoo. Call me a curio, one Hottentot show. Ask
how I learnt to admire the prettiest bruise. Or how a body
can be sold into anything. O what soiled words I could fit my
lips around. And, body, found object whose hole can hold
anything. If I embrace this emptiness, all puppetry is possible.
I stuffed most of myself down his snow-globe exotica, found
room for my black head on his mahogany shelf. Squeezed
between David Foster Wallace and a gilded map of the
Americas. He liked his women unspoken, the body
imperfect. To mark and remark that terrible wound. No
matter if sugar was dulled and unconscious. He preferred to
invent a person there. He ached to be inside, thought he
deserved to claim it; as if there was something here to be
reclaimed. Some mystery codified in the dark bone. As if a
self could be unowned.

 
Safiya Sinclair

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), and the chapbook Catacombs (Argos Books, 2011). She is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a winter fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently a currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. 

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Notes on the State of Virginia, II
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