Exodus
After November 5, 2024,
our household is not the only one where heads are cocked,
hands of twenty-somethings firmly on their hips–
I’m leaving. Spain. Or Portugal. Or Ghana.
For good.
You coming?
Brandon Durham and his family’s grief.
A federal judge ruling that it was not
the improper warrant,
the six bullets out of 32 that pierced her body,
but the bullet Kenneth Walker fired
believing he and Breonna were being robbed,
was the cause of Breonna’s death.
The president-elect promises: I will always back the blue.
His party, fighting to
roll back civil rights for women
people of color
LGBTQ communities,
dismantle the Department of Education
cut federal spending–
schools
hospitals
housing
childcare
public transit
climate change.
I should say yes.
But two years left before I can retire.
Mother nestles her eighty-five-year-old frame
in her favorite sofa spot every day.
Rolls her eyes, throws her hands up in the air at
sorting decades of family photographs, clothing, legal documents, and bills.
What am I supposed to do?
We will just take her with us.
I should acquiesce.
But there is my life here in the Bronx–
the neighbors I greet each dawn and dusk,
bustling to our cars, buses, and subways.
Caribbean Spanish and Spanglish and patois,
sweet soundtrack of the 6.
My black and brown students, who,
like the trees and gardens lining my blocks,
bloom every year.
The loved ones at rest,
whose names will everlast
at Woodlawn and Mount Hope.
If I go
how often will I come back to eastern North Carolina,
walk the cemetery,
rest a hand on each gravestone,
as I whisper my thank-yous,
tread
Great-Grandfather’s sable soil–
blood and afterbirth,
sweat and tears,
decades of detritus, harvest after harvest
of peanuts and cotton and tobacco,
and sit beneath the great old Oak,
Daddy’s voice in the breeze
Carla M. Cherry’s work has appeared in various publications, including Random Sample Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, La Libreta, ISLE, and Raising Mothers. She authored six books of poetry: Gnat Feathers and Butterfly Wings, Thirty Dollars and a Bowl of Soup, Honeysuckle Me, These Pearls Are Real, Stardust and Skin, and May He Bless My Name (iiPublishing), and two chapbooks: Clap Your Hands, Stomp Your Feet (Grandma Moses Press) and Sundays and Hot Buttered Rolls: A Granddaughter of Harlem Speaks (Finishing Line Press). She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York.
The Marbled Sigh 