The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

by Junauda Petrus

you been taught that Spirit speak loudest when we deep in the water, drowning in trouble and fear.”

“Life is strange, and it will break you to help you heal ancient wounds,

Ain’t Black women always saving everything anyway?

WHY I HAVE TO LOVE SOMEONE I CAN’T LOVE?

I ain’t never kissed nobody before. I ain’t even feel I wanted to kiss anyone before. But Neri made me wonder: What would it feel like to kiss her right on her mouth?

So when my heart start tingling, I ain’t surprised that I found Spirit in church with Neri.

My spirit found rhythm with the water and Neri’s breath.

I felt like I was her enemy and not she only child.

Fight come out of Queenie, before tears, but she was crying for me.

I ain’t understand how God finally make sense in your arms and in your church.

Every time I look at water, I will be at church with you. I love you. Forever

I’m in my father’s house in the United States of America. Yet, I still feeling like I was just pluck up from the ground and thrown in the wind.

Not that a Black girl ever needs to give a reason as to why America don’t get no respect.

And I say well, Daphne, you prefer the shit in or the shit out?”

’cause she understand the inherent perfection of her existence is healer and the ancestors are trees connected in roots growing towards stars

All of us got poetry in us, ’cause our lives are in constant motion and unfolding, and when we observe it and behold it, it becomes poetry.

What kind of place must you wear two sets of clothes to not die of cold?

If I can’t stop my tears, then I need to feel my body, feel in control of it in other ways.

“Let the pain leave out of you with each breath. It want to be free too,”

At least we are broken and scared together.

I’m a tight bud and I try to melt a little, so I can open.

I don’t know what I could want except for my life and they already gave me that one time.

just the love is what she tastes and the love is what remain

To the constellations of ancestors in our bones.

I protect that young boy’s soul by reminding him he is infinite, like the stars and the blackness between them.

That, maybe, our blackness holds our ancient cosmic memory.

Queenie has more magic than her walls can contain,

“I believe dreams hold the memory of all the places where a soul has traveled since the beginning of existence.

“Why your fear know you and how it find you? What it want to heal? Who in yuh blood is arriving in this fear?”

All this is feeling too big.

“Healing is like falling in love, but deeper. You unite with someone so that you can work alchemy with they soul. So that they might elevate and revive them and heal not only them but their ancestors. And like love, if you don’t know how to protect yourself, it could consume you.”

Every day is long and every night is longer, but every day my life is getting shorter,

We were convicts of earth entering a cosmic cathedral.

Remember that you are from the stars and that you can return to them. Remember you are a sacred being of love, no matter the darkness of an earthly life.

You heal through the compassion you give to yourself. Remember you are an astronaut of the soul. May you find solace in your travel to another star.

and my dad was afraid to turn around and soothe him in case the cops reacted with bullets.

I guess life has a lot of little deaths before we leave this planet officially.

And in ways we are always alone, and in other ways, we never are, since there are feelings and beings that are unseen and unknown in this world that are around us and protect us.

And nothing in life prepares you to live, truly live, knowing that death is near.

when you combine the powers of Scorpio, who goes as deep as a submarine made out of hematite and ancestors’ bones and as far reaching as Aquarius to the birthing of universe itself, you find a love that is dangerous and divine.

“You an old soul in the body of a young wild woman,

“The prettiest voices are kites for the heaviest hearts,”

And at the same time I feel like I can imagine myself being more than an afraid girl dying but a soul that can return again and be a multidimensional being.

Every woman I have loved has shown me Goddess and devastation and I thank them every day for the lessons and insights in their love.

All I know about love is how to find its hurt and its endings after I find its sweetness.

“You are a good person, okay? Even if your mama can’t see it.”

Life is hard for we women, because we strong and the world ain’t wan’ to love us for it.

“Audre, I think what many parents struggle with, mine included, is that they may not know how to love us in the way that we need.

It wasn’t that he didn’t love me, it was that he didn’t really love himself.”

I had never left the US before and hadn’t known what it was like to be in a place where you didn’t feel the oppression of America, where you had Black people in power and there was a pride in being from some place.