Overture

Gather your ghosts, and listen to this lineage:
miracle baby with river grass and rice braided into her hair
runs down the street touching the palm trees
and growing dark in the Florida sun. She dark as history, as memory,
as a child who has lived many lives.

She wears the christening written by her father’s mother,
worn by a sister named for mourning and cousins
who share her face. Call in the grandmothers. Somewhere,
Nana still prays up a baptism, while everything she touched
is left damp. What to name this child of the Atlantic, born of the sea,

running on the wind like a whisper? This tantrum of ocean
drowned the family tree with need. Her survival is a memorial.
Death is a riptide through the blood leaving her with bodies
and questions. There are so many people
she must meet before she touches ground:

greats and grands and an uncle who left
to prepare a place made holy out of faith.
She is ahead of her time and timeless. Child of heartbreak.
Child of love. Child birthing free. Child of water. Child of sun.

Child ain’t nothing but a measure of life:
ghost child, unborn child, this child. Coming in the shadow
of Miami’s sun—I was born in the wake of a city
that has lived many lives—Mayaimi, English’s plantation,
Bay Country, Filer’s Grove, Fort Dallas, Colored Town.

If you listen, you can still hear me
chiseling coral rock, oolite limestone, and carving
the live oak into something that will survive me.
I laid Flagler’s train tracks and drained the everglades;
it was my feet sopping mud like a sharecrop.

I came in 1804, then by 1896 Miami needed more of me
to vote this city into a freedom dream. I died so that I could live.
This whole state my elegy: Florida a sanctuary state I made
free. I will be named for the death and life of women, the living of men
and mothers, the journeys of runaways. What an immaculate

conception: the lives I carry like a pregnant ocean. Blues babies
overboarded got caught in the rapture of this body.
But you know, Death don’t like losing. So, when I came he left me
with a trail of memories that trace time through this bloodline.