Notes on the State of Virginia, II Poem by Safiya Sinclair

February, I am an open wound—woman discarded
and woman emerging. Scars devising scars.
To live here we know precisely how to be haunted.
Sundown sun, a sterile sky come running,
sweet gallow-grass whistling; Ghosts.
All year we learn that chainsaw hymnal, outside the Lawn,
another excavation—slave quarters found concealed
in the student dorms; buried rooms choked, sounds
bricked off. Two centuries' thorns may break sudden bloom.
What can we say? No one speaks of it. I dream pristine.
And skirting the caution-tape instead, we clasp hands
with each other in complicity.

Somewhere, the ghost-arm of history
still throttling me. This taste of old blood on the wind,
the crouched statue of Sacajawea shrouded behind the pioneers.
Creature of unbelonging, unname a new silence.
Magnolia explosion, its Leviathan shade.
Then fall, what sick messiah. Fall, I am coughing in
the aisles again, where bare triage of voices pour molasses in
my ear. Where a bald insurrection of tongues. Then
squashed rebellion, scrutiny. Indoctrination.
To live here we know precisely how to be hunted.