by Shakeema Smalls
The grave I dug for my mutt. The roses I stake at his head, its petals falling over the red brick, his favorite washcloth strewn across the back rail, covered in pine straw and refuse. Rain seeping between the shingles of the roof, booming humidity, steam rising from it as if one day we will miss summer. All beings know what we know; what is beneath our fears, what wakes us. My toes pressed into soil, I avoid tenements of ants venting the walls of their home with leaves and wax. If stepped on, they will scatter. Life is tenuous; like us, they wait for death as they put their young to sleep. I become a tourist in this familiar; the smell of the land fills me like hot rice. The buzzards dance under the pecan tree and I beg their loose feathers as they pull rotten meat from each other’s beaks. Like them, I want to be fed and touched in this world. I stretch out and preen at the leggy okra. I receive its lessons on how to look fabulous while dying on an alien planet.
Shakeema Smalls is from Georgetown, South Carolina. Her work has been published in a variety of outlets including Honey Literary, Hayden’s Ferry, Emergent Literary, Tidal Basin Review, Root Work Journal, Radius Lit, Free Black Space, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Rigorous, and A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine, among others. She is a Tin House Workshop and VONA alum. She was also a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow. She has upcoming work in The Ocean State Review, Fruit Journal, and Foglifter.