Haint Blue
“Red, White and Black make Blue” - Andrea Feeser
Grams says a haint sat on her bed when she was a girl. When I was a girl I got to visit her childhood home, where she learnt how to be the third girl. A lesson she taught my mama who taught me. Some thangs just got to be learnt on a porch. I am the third girl of a third girl of a third girl of old blood in a new body. I am a Freeman. I am love & craft & country. I got some steady eyes in the back of my hope. Some spells just take centuries & so much blood to complete. I be a good book in bad hands. I am the sword & the stone it was pulled from. I am pinned to my own chest like a note from a teacher. Education is a woman who comes from porch people. Ancient like
darkness. Each strand of her hair is a new name for a god that you won't even try to pronounce correctly. Her heart is on backwards. I am to go back and stop her from crossing the water. I am haunting myself for generations. I am haunting myself into myself, into my self. The water is whatever you think it is. I am right after something borrowed. A gift that will not be returned easily.
Indigo child, my sister Angie called me Indigo child when I was a child. I looked it up only once and it scared the prayers out of me. Just like in third grade when that lady with a smile that filled the whole classroom, sent me home with a packet. I read it before sharing it with my mom or my grandma. I couldn't stop shivering. It said your child is terribly gifted, it did not say with what.
darkness. Each strand of her hair is a new name for a god that you won't even try to pronounce correctly. Her heart is on backwards. I am to go back and stop her from crossing the water. I am haunting myself for generations. I am haunting myself into myself, into my self. The water is whatever you think it is. I am right after something borrowed. A gift that will not be returned easily.
Indigo child, my sister Angie called me Indigo child when I was a child. I looked it up only once and it scared the prayers out of me. Just like in third grade when that lady with a smile that filled the whole classroom, sent me home with a packet. I read it before sharing it with my mom or my grandma. I couldn't stop shivering. It said your child is terribly gifted, it did not say with what.
Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland Ohio, where she is the current Lake Erie Siren. A two time nominee for the pushcart prize, a finalist for the 2017 button poetry chapbook competition, a 2017 bettering American poet and Best Of The Net Poet, a 2018 winter tangerine chapbook fellow and a 2018 Poetry Foundation incubator fellow. Siaara is a four year PinkDoor Fellow & 2018 Pinkdoor Faculty member. She is a teaching artist for Center For Arts Inspired Learning and For the Sisterhood Project in conjunction with the Anisfieldwolf Foundation. She is a 2020 WateringHole Manuscript fellow. She is a 2021 Cleveland Public Theater emerging Playwright Fellow. Her work appears in, The Offing, BOAAT, Tinderbox, Josephine Quarterly, Pinch, Cahoodling, Crabfat and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Outsiders Queer Midwest Writers Retreat. In her spare time she is growing her afro so tall God mistakes it for a microphone and tries to speak through her. Chances are she's by a lake, thinking about Toni Morrison and talking to ghosts.