The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

by Junauda Petrus

“Audre, you are a wild nurturing. You are a complicated specialness. You are ancestral perseverance and sacred erotic,” she says, like she praying, holding me close to her. I cry louder.

“And, dahlin’, let me tell you something for truth: America have dey spirits too, believe me,” she say, and she puts out her spliff, rubs my back, and starts humming a song into my spine. It a quiet and low song, and I feel my heart inhale the love of it.

I lie into she shoulder, wanting to feel the wind and sky she pull down cool my chest and lift up the space my heart is crumpled in.

“Life is strange, and it will break you to help you heal ancient wounds, me dahlin’.”

Ain’t Black women always saving everything anyway? Why can’t we save Whitney?

BLK LVRS.

I memorize

your skin and you tattoo your love and your poetry on me You love like rain You beautiful sweet You saturate me my ancestral wifey give me touches that sweeten up complexities with all of the tenderness with all of the permission You are temptation and goddess perfection.

The energy in our hands was singing a gospel the whole time, and I felt the sermon through her palm.

smiling at me and then looking at the water all the while she was making an instrument of me.

My dad uses classic hip-hop as curriculum, proverb, reflection, and a practical tool in his fatherhood.

“I ain’t even saying bye. I love you, and I is in every breeze you feel and you is right here,”

I’m in the prettiest garden in the North Side with a girl who talk so pretty she has me feeling like I can hear melodies in her voice.

We are within our own force, like a heavy dusk holding us. Everything she says lands in me, hot and tingling.

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.

“My love is as ancient as my blood. And of course my blood is still mine because a woman, sweetened black with good song, pulled me from the river like an axe pulled back from the bark.

The steel between my thighs is lightning, and the breeze on my back is my wings. The blackness is an oil spill of indigo and cosmos spread before me. I is fire in my lungs, and each breath feel like it almost want to drown me or levitate me. I is riding so fast, I hear every conversation of every winged thing that prevail in the night. They gossip and laugh, and it shudders a sparkle into my spirit, and I can go faster. My skin is glowing, and I is levitating over life, over myself and the hurt, but then over the trees and the streetlights.

The Stars and the Blackness Between Them: The Memoir of Afua.

To the constellations of ancestors in our bones. Thank you.

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

“I read it in a book. I take it to mean that as Black folks we are limitless. That, maybe, our blackness holds our ancient cosmic memory. What if our wisdom can come from our dreams, not just churches and Bibles?”

“The stars and the blackness between them is the melanin in my skin,”

That was seven years ago that I began to understand how to read the medicine in existence.

“I feel less . . . wack or hopeless or somethin’. Like I’m a part of the universe, when I’m reading this book.”

my mama’s womb is encrusted in rubies of calcified blood heirlooms of mothers and grandmothers whose womb never got to belong to them

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

me. No one ever tell you that falling in love with another Black girl would allow you to feel like you a part of an ancient and precious secret.

didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched up into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.’”

I think if I have to die, let it be softly. In her arms, in her smell, in her gap.

I die, right there, the sweetest disappearing into her. All night and into the early morning.

“Me and your mama learned how to wrap babies up with fabric from Mrs. Roma, a Ghanaian woman who lived in our old apartment building who used to watch you too. After we learned how to do that, you refused to be carried any other way,” he

I know I ain’t as cool and down as your mama, but I love you more than the universe can hold, Mabel.

Coney Island have a feeling like it been here since the beginning of time. I look at the stars start to twinkle above us slowly in a sky that is the strangest blue. Like a blue I ain’t ever see before if I is real. It look like it mix with lavender and periwinkle and amethyst.

I staring at it for a second, and I feeling something in me yearn to fly into it. The sparkling lights of the rides and food stands are dazzling against the plum alchemy of the sky becoming. With rickety boardwalks, dried and smoothed by salt and sand and people. The air feel hot like a kiss, and the ocean breeze find its way to my scalp and cheeks and it remind me to slow down and take all of this in. The sky and the way my body feels. The way my heels feel in my sandals and the sensation of the African fabric I have wrapped around my shoulders and the blue above me ripening into blackness.

We was a cosmic conversation, before I even met you in this life.