The Acts of Becoming Undone

With lines from Chet’la Sebree and C.F. Sibley

I. 

A girl is born. She is black. She reads and plays. She is kissed by a boy. It is the first time something is stolen from her. He calls it a game; she calls it a secret. She shaves her legs—later, reckons with her mother’s warning. The hair will grow back thicker, thickness is always seen as chaos. She is the soft one; she is like glass. She breaks easy. She is pillaged in a church hallway by greedy hands—looks up the definition of pillage to make sure she didn’t ask for it. She falls in love with handlers. It’s cliche, but all she’s ever wanted was to be wanted. She tells no one, but leaves notes on pillows and sheets. She forgets to tell herself but remembers anyway. She dreams of becoming a woman—a sacrifice born in ritual.

II.

In this poem, the boy is not a thief. 
The girl doesn’t know the definition of sacrifice. 
The church remains a haven.
In this poem she throws the razor away.
Softness learns to live with sharp,
glass is glued back together so no one knows it was broken. 
In this poem she doesn’t play games, only reads fairy tales.
In this poem she doesn’t fall in love with men who handle or roughness or bruises or hands squeezing neck or fucking in the backseat of cars or her desperate mouth or the burst of cherries or blood on pants or being kept or unread messages or nonchalance or doubting herself or asking question after question after question after question after question.
In this poem, her body is just a body.
In this poem she doesn’t care if anybody wants her because she wants herself.
In this poem she is not a keeper of secrets.
She is not black or a girl.
In this poem, God holds her body, opens her mother’s womb, and pushes her back in. 

A. Benét is a Black emerging poet from California. She loves literature and has a weakness for coffee and the color of burnt clay. She writes about a melting pot of navigating healing with the hope that Black girls and women will see themselves in her work. Her work is featured in The Origami Review, Unstamatic Magazine, and is forthcoming in Feed, Celestite Magazine, and Last Leaves Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @benetthewriter.