This Might Even Be a Poem
Grief falls like the gentlest of snow on the hedgerow. Shalista drives alongside.
Bye, Felicia, Calissa, Moesha, all her sisters in the rearview as she steers the rented Fiat (hired, they say) along an Irish backroad, wipers stiff and punctual as metronomes. Trombones in the tightest horn section.
Grief is each snowflake and all the snow. Tune the radio and listen to a man with a butterscotch voice recount atrocities. That there is our precise, our lurid century.
Endless carmine-purple heads of fuchsia bowed beneath the steady weight of white. And that is not a metaphor. The shame of colour underneath a steel-grey sky, wishing for something else, wanting the comfort of some other, to find some way to hide.
You are camphor, an aroma, a bitter blessing offered by a wraith.
Find a place to sleep. Some quiet B&B. An old barracks. Banagher, Ballincollig, Bantry Bay. Where no bad things happen, no boys playing football in a sunshower field in June are murdered for wearing the colours of the enemy. No one is raped or robbed of breath by power. Of agency bereft. You, my dark and blessèd swan, are an American woman. You too have ancestry. Some things you may never discover. But most you surely will. Welcome, Shalista. Welcome, love. Tread tenderly. Listen.
Look at your amazing things.
***
She's heard all the names a million times. The ones aimed at her heart. The casual ones half-barked in passing that once in a while still stop her in her tracks. Words for her race. Her gender. Pitiful slingshots of the boilerplate bigot. At times she wonders if this world's some godawful dream, created on some steamy bayou, sweated by some reeking white man while he rakes his humid ballsack with yellowing fingernails.
Then there was that moment she found a cousin on the internet and almost thought she might escape.
Ireland. Where black ain't black and white ain't white, and everything is forty shades of emerald.
To Eire is human. The map of our journey is traced in random fibres, some of them divine.
***
She pulls into the car park of a pub, Róisín Dubh. The gravel under her tires is frost giants crunching ice. All is cold as a witch's hole in January, her breath as she steps from the rental the traceried ghost of the world's tree. However dark our skin our bones and breath are white. This Celtic place, these Nordic tales. All our tormented, discordant ancestry.
What a woman does is know her kin.
***
They take you in. Things quickly fall apart, grow terrible.
"Shalista, love, just eat your food."
"Ain't ever ate no horse, but I already know I hate it."
"It's not horse, my girl, it's liver."
"The hell? Meet mother Africa, bitch-ass fool."
The melting snow uncovers something worse.
Your eyes peeled and your ears on twitch.
Radar, antennas, the very edge of the apocalypse.
You or they won't easily or ever forget this.