My Faith Unfolds Itself
after Faith Ringgold’s exhibit, “Black is beautiful,” at the Picasso Museum, Paris, 2023
like a ribbonless plait: the rain outside descends in strands:percussive opera for the sheltered: petrichor of hominy and green:grief everywhere, all at once : and then the sun : reminds me I'm not new:they are my dowry : the gone ones and their light : refracted throughthe body's fluids : o rivers : how to marry threads of water with faith:predates language : but the word was the beginning : have we come this far by fate:roots fracture, forget, then return : curse the pattern of rupture then mend : not unlikethe making of a quilt, or muscle : broth born of fire and water : fists full of ephemerals:blood-honey : water always finds her way: I plump and soften : like soaked grain.
Feature Date
- November 28, 2024
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Copyright © 2024 by Alafia Nicole Sessions.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Alafia Nicole Sessions lives in Atlanta. She is a nominee for Best New Poets and the winner of the Furious Flower Prize, selected by Evie Shockley. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-A-Day, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Ecopoetry Anthology, Southern Humanities Review, Indiana Review, Radar Poetry, Los Angeles Review, Obsidian and elsewhere. For her work, Alafia has received an award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and fellowships from The Watering Hole and Yaddo, where she received the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry. She is a finalist for the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
21.1
Cincinnati, Ohio
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