“Post-Split Consciousness” and “For the Black Reader” by Lyra Thomas

"Post-Split Consciousness"
After my parents split, my comfort suspended
and raised up as if strewn through with thread,
shifted and landed in my grandmother’s family room

near the moonlit monstera in the window
where she gave her daughter money for air mattresses,
and we drove to walmart in the star punctured cloth

of night to get them. My siblings and I slept on them
for that half-year of uncertainty; Through a skin splitting winter
where electric wires snapped midair, and we walked

around the rooms with coats zipped and gloves on
like wind-chilled ghosts to preserve any bodily warmth,
any semblance of sanity. Two pairs of socks, pairs of pants–

God, I always find it funny the coldest winter
was the one I didn’t have a home, a room, a corner
to call my own. Was the one I dared to speak

on the fire my uncle tended to in the old fireplace
that sputtered and coughed just like the rest of us,
sick and tired of being cold, and he snapped

his head back and said you think I don’t know
how to keep a fucking fire going? Why can’t you stay
in a child’s place? And I cried until his face thawed

from a frost wicked desperation to that look mom had
when she caught the mouse in the glue trap in the old house
but didn’t realize how much it would suffer before dying.

But I get it now, that child’s place, that unwavering quiet
in the snowglobe of the life I had then, where every fake snowflake
sank while I floated up for those last bubbles of air at the surface

as if I were a defect, something they forgot to glue in place.
Who was I to ask about the fire anyway?
                                            Who was I to ask for more?

"For the Black Reader"
It’s like this;
Embracing your skin when you are dark
like the soil our ancestors were forced to work
smelling of sunlight and shea butter
is so terrifying to them, so intimidating,
that they tried everything in their power
to make it seem like a crime.

Embracing your hair when it coils
like the spring of an ink pen,
defies gravity like birthday balloons,
and refuses to be held back like some exploding star,
is something that they could never understand.

So I wrote this for you:
some thesaurus for darkness,
my attempt at taking your face in my hands
and singing you lullabies to help your jaw loosen
and your temples soften to the touch.
There are so many things I want to tell you.

Listen, you are like the Earth.
Beautiful, plentiful, complex.
People spend hours tending to it, nurturing it,
and in return it provides. And don’t you know
how nebulous you are? How full of life and wonder?
So many constellations within you,
I could never count them all.

And how crepuscular, how mystical, how enigmatic.

Don’t you know how much astounding matter
is in just one black life? We’re the stuff of stars,

reader, imagine the wonder we hold in our hands.

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