Excerpts from the Firebird/ In search of black spring

Photographs of black women standing alone in nature, or the polluted centers of parking garages, or the pristine gottied feeling of roman arches, or in egypt or wherever black women are sold, are beginning to give me obscene pleasure, as if we’re safest in those tropical solos of the calloused heel seeping out our gazes in relaxed with-teeth smiles. Calm down, sorrow. And when I climb my shallow hill first thing in the morning and stand alone before the arbor of stinging beetles, a silent sacrifice, eternal, I feel safer in the practical burst of wind and abandonment, my choice this time,  than in any man’s arms, safer than I’ve ever been from the swarm. So safe I could scream and he’d be born.