Adesuwa Agbonile

elegy to box braid left Alone And Untended To
on the stairs of my all-white high school

I.
my body is something to be learned
about: physics defying piece of machinery
or piece of cloth, or crushed velvet crushed bone crushed
like flat Stanley i will
get up then fold myself in &
ship myself back to my mother
land unfamiliar & forgotten unless it is the insides of her thighs
clapping my shoulders together
pushing me in after pushing me out & now pushing me through

[Here’s my advice, my mother says.
here is my. advice – if you don’t want to think you’re – no, I mean
if you don’t want other people to think you’re. fat. well,
then, you should just stop drinking that strawberry milk, abi?
Just like that, my sweetness down the drain,
her knuckles pressed against my head]

my body is something to figure
out of the great gatherings of my past & the
split-ends of conversations left hanging by a thread
picked up with fat greedy chocolate fingers & mashed into
my own mouth i gobble them up i
figure if i do this long enough
my body will form itself i mean i will form it into good
figure straight lines gelled with blue magic held down by water
this body as something that can be done / undone / fallen out / left behind / bereft.

II.
you know how box braids get too heavy to hold themselves &
careen to the ground like overripe mango splitting open look at that pulp

[you know the brittle pain of that? You know how you never feel it,
then afterwards you’re thinking, huh, weird,
where did you even come from? how come you don’t even feel replaceable,
how come i can’t even miss you? even though you’re right here, in front of me
now i have this dead
thing that will have no burial or reincarnation even though some mother
split her fingers open over it basically knuckled it right into existence
and now – ]

III.
something to be learned
about: how things hanging on so tight still
fall.

Adesuwa Agbonile [ah-DAY-sue-wah AG-boh-nile] is a fiction writer and poet at Stanford, where she is graduating in June 2021. She loves writing about what it means to be a Black woman, the way people look at and through each other, and how we construct our bodies. Also, if you get her started, she can talk for hours about the societal implications of Netflix reality TV.