This post is part of an ongoing #BlackFuturesMonth18 series in February with the Black Lives Matter Network, exclusively shared on Blavity, that aims to explore what the Black feminist future can and should look like for all of us.
We are excited to present the works of Junauda Petrus and Joy Spika as our debuting artistic pair for #BlackFuturesMonth18.
Junauda Petrus is a creative activist, writer, playwright and multi-dimensional performance artist who is Minneapolis-born, West-Indian descended and African-sourced. Junauda is joined by mentor and educator Joy Spika, who believes in the power of art to communicate and connect people.
Junauda has written the poem below (she orates the piece in the video above, which was recorded under the super blue blood moon on January 31), and Joy has created the accompanying art to bring you their visions of a Black Feminist Future.
"Water Constellations"
Poem by Junauda Petrus
Artwork by Joy Spika
1.
This morning,
before 5am
I woke up hips burnin’ and
they asking
to be
bathed in saltwater
and float
away pain
ancient as wound.
Starlit,
candlelight
looking at myself
curves of skin
break water breaks
and I ask the nebula
in my bathwater to let me know
what I need to heal the things
I ain’t even know the root of?
Root chakra got to do with
family and tribe
and dispersed and dispelled and
diaspora of
outburst,
turned
inside out.
I anchor
hips/ass
down into water
warmed, sea-salted,
rosemary, eucalyptus
scented and oiled.
Turmeric essenced.
Star dipped.
And I ask again and again
what roots am I turning up,
turning out
in these
relic
burning hips
of mine?
2.
Once when my mom was taking a bath
she pulled my sister and me in the tub with her.
I was 5 and my sister was 4.
She was taking a bath and we wouldn’t leave her alone.
We never wanted to leave from around her,
so she pulled us into the tub with all of our clothes on.
I splashing around with my sister,
in our mom’s rare silly,
swimming around her perfect body,
the body we was from,
living in her laughter.
“In my next life,
I ain’t havin’ no kids.
I gon’ just travel the world
and have a bunch of lovers,”
mama says in her Trini accent,
to me and my aunt
31 years later,
on a Saturday afternoon.
She sounds joyful and decided.
She says it like
she has already made the appointment in her date book.
I am sitting on her bed, puffing her trees.
Incense burning by the bedroom door.
Some of my mommy’s and auntie’s grandkids are in the next room.
We are in her first apartment she has ever had by herself.
My mom was a mom at 15 and never lived alone.
Now she brags about her cream colored couch.
Her space is filled with books about
Buddhism, Afrikan spirituality and herbalism
she reads and meditates with
every morning around 5.
She is 60, I am 36.
Suddenly we are woman to woman.
Me with no kids to her 4 daughters.
My aunt Brenda, laughing at my mom’s
imaginary harem
chimes in about how instead of kids
in her next lifetime
she is gonna be a dancer.
My mom suggests she should also get a girlfriend.
I remind them they are both still alive
beautiful and black
free to hoe around
and dance
as they please.
They remind me
they Trinidadian girls
moved from island to island
to Texas to Minnesota
raised their children together
caught buses
against hood tundras,
in the era of drug wars,
tethered by the respectability of motherhood.
Our daddies got to play out the wounds
of their childhood abandonment
in dramatic grown men tantrums
of abandoned baby mamas and drug addictions.
My aunt
the free spirit of my nostalgia.
Who I loved to watch drink rum
and party and dance to Soca.
Who would go out to the club
red and black spandex,
flaming Fashion Fair lips on her dark skin,
gap resplendent and sexy.
The one who taught me how to be lush internally.
Tells me it was different for them,
than it was for me
And suddenly we are girl to girl.
3.
This one I can’t forget.
We met in the cafeteria
at community college,
among all the Black kids who convened
to flirt with each other,
gossipped about Black Planet
brought speakers, brought bass,
left for the park to puff on communally resourced blunts.
I was 19 when we met and she was 22.
She had her own place.
She had two sons and a baby daddy,
who lurked to undermine her being free of him.
These things made her seem grown to me.
She was the type to shape shift,
her femmeness
marvelous and for her only.
Her hips wider and heavier
then all the truths wrapped up
into her headwrap.
She showed me
I wanted to love on a woman
my whole life.
I tried to disappear,
not knowing how to hold it.
I fell in love
and did not know
that was
what it was.
My existence
would be quiet prayer
to fall into her completely
surrounded in layers
sacred and fleeting.
She became
calls on phones with
coiled cords unraveling down
the hallway into my bedroom at
my mama’s house.
We would talk all night
and tightly held things
lotused from my chest
out my mouth.
She was an Aquarian soul that
had the capacity to hold me.
Water bearer taught me
how to bathe
as a grown woman.
I would ride for
an hour and a half,
by bus,
each way.
Bring her chocolates and treats
just to find myself in her clawfoot tub.
At night,
her small apartment,
her small bathroom,
a spa.
She would make warm waterfalls
fill a basin of porcelain.
Lavender bubbles,
dead sea salts,
rose water and
dried petals.
Floating.
I levitate in her hot spring.
My titties and belly button
break foam and glisten in candlelight.
She let me feel pretty and
alluring for myself.
Loving her I was in over my head,
learning how to swim.
And I wanted to kiss her.
With all my heat.
4.
For her. I
put
Florida water,
lavender oil,
rose water, and
epsom salt
in our tub
in our pink bathroom.
Place
rose petals in it. I
blast a space heater
in the bathroom
to keep the air warm. I
put pots of water to boil on the stove
for when the bath cool off.
Slow and deep.
My beautiful boi,
divine hubby
from Cameroon
who love me
like I ain’t even know I
could be love like.
Her arms
immersions in
ancestral love.
I make her a bath and talk to
my great-great grandmother
in Trinidad
who died before I
existed.
Who my mama say
lived real close to the water
who used to swim out real far at sunrise
then swim back.
She would drink a couple of gulps of
salt water at the end of her swim.
Drink middle passage
become libation.
I hold this in my heart when
I am making a bath for my lover
on a Sunday.
She dips in the sea
made for her
and she smiles at me.
Imagine ancestors
laid up in love
just like us.
The moaning of women
in my ancestral bloods, I
invite them
to live loud in me. I
swirl the waters
with my hand, I
am sitting dry
next to the tub
and in love
with my lover’s skin,
grazing her
with my fingers.
