On Intimacy

Omotara James

When we meet at the holiday table, we take turns

and great pains not to remind each other

of our mutual and reciprocal disappointments.

Mum looks around for the grandchildren

I would not bear. Her glances ricochet

off the high gloss white lacquer of  the tabletop.

I touch my toes to the smooth walnut veneer.

Stare at her, solemnly holding her responsible

for the re-parenting I must do in my adulthood,

if  I am to have even a slight chance. White supremacy

would have me believe that forty is too late for a debut.

It’s a debut when the petals are tender.

As long as the stem still sips water. As long as the leaves

suckle at the sunlight. In order to construct a poem

about climate crisis, I’m going to have to discuss how

inhospitable this planet has been to my love life.

Moreover, the research I’ve conducted demonstrates

that with each day, earth becomes less conducive

to nurturing someone with capacity to love me properly.

With generosity. The planet heats with increasing hostility

to their sustained existence. To their soft insistence.

Will actually obliterate them. Sure, I’ve had a lover, or two,

but I’ve found more pleasure gazing past the lankiness of ten

stems of  tulips and into my favorite black and white portrait

of  Nigerian children in tutus, their arms extending joy

into their abstract, gray environs. I reimagine my childhood

to be full of  the kind of  beauty that would compel someone

to take a photo of me, my pointed toes filling out the soft

pleather of my first ballet shoes, my small back arched

toward the possibility of heaven. The long green

of  the tulip leaves returns to focus just long enough

to replicate this hallelujah. There is no one on my bed

sitting up with me, or in repose, lovingly parting

the soft folds of my back as I hunch to write this or

imploring me to stop tapping my ashy feet against my

makeshift writing table when I have a perfectly good desk.

No one to persuade me to return to bed with an offer

of  thick lotion warmed between two affectionate hands

for a midnight foot rub. But here I go again, distracting

the reader from my point, in favor of love. Okay

reader, do I have to spell it out? Is it not obvious by now?

I am a Black woman. FKA a coloured woman. FKA a negro woman.

FKA a star. If  I want freedom, I must travel far

into the future, or far back enough before

it became the fashion to document me out of  it.

Although I’ve never been a fan of  false idolatry,

I wouldn’t mind finding a woman to worship me.

To gaze into my heavens, the twinkle of my fires

lighting her eyes. Yesterday evening I cut the stems

at an angle so they might gulp their water but not

quench their thirst immediately. I let them linger awhile

on the cold counter before permitting the cheeks

of  their plump buds to startle red. The air purifier blasts

on high tonight, the sky is a burnt orange, a strangled violet.

The smoke hawks a phlegm of fog over the Brooklyn light.

My chest rattles with the destruction of  Canada’s wildfires.

The sepia sky is as close to beauty as love is to violence.

If  the Bush administration had initiated the Kyoto Protocol

in 2001, I might be celebrating my twenty-year anniversary.

I understand my life is of  less influence

than the flower arrangement outside the lobby

of the conference room of  Exxon executives

exerting power. I wonder if the administrative assistant

avoids the color red? Instead, many birds of paradise

and peace lilies. Long green stems suggestive of the tropics,

but not the fingers who harvest them. Who sow the seeds.

I tell my mother she has a granddaughter in my cat.

At this, my mother never laughs. I’m trying to recall

the last time her even-toned skin creased with joy.

She doesn’t think I look like her, but every time

I brush by a reflective surface, I see her frowning

back at me. The air inside her house is thick

with undiscussed disgust and the neutral silk flowers

of my childhood. Dear reader, tell me where I should go,

forward or back?