The true nature of power lies in one’s ability
to balm one’s oldest wounds
with a reclamation of self, source, and sanctity.
We desire our return to wholeness
and so seek it out in the world,
pulling from the land, or taking from others
what we feel we’ve lost: our dignity
—muted by a garden’s worth of ghosts.
My own want for power drove me,
to the edge and I fell, like so many
deep into the crevasse of Sedona’s flora. Clusters of canopy
shivered with my arrival, their pale limbs vulnerable
to the ceaseless blaze of headlights, a concert
of mechanical hungers aching for the dirt
of the desert’s nakedness, refracted light like snakes
swerving carelessly into the shapely shadows
of us avid voyeurs. Like me, they had all come
into the abyss of Arizona to tour a siloed wildness.
Fuse with the incalculable throb of currents
tied taut and thin under cracked soil and sun.
From the waterlogged missive of the Pacific, I had come
in search of a Mother, an Origin. More than my ichor
I needed to know the particular conjure
of my structure—the bawdy shape of my passions
inherited from the incline. I wanted to convince myself of an affinity
for healing—an aptitude for kinetic evolution.
Like the planet itself, an orgasmic creature floating
through the horizonless sea of the universe—
I needed to know I could, again, be thoroughly alive
even after a cataclysmic series of disasters.
Around and around Bell Rock, I hiked
until I came to twisted juniper
with all its pulsing prayers and braided branch;
the red rocks rousing epic wax and wane.
Staring out into the abyss, the bush I counted
millions of solar flares, each of them fingering
the ultraviolet of evening—a tinted mimosa pressing
its silk mouth to my swollen knees.
Finally exhausted, I stopped to massage the horizon
until it hummed viva, magenta
praying hopefully that this breach
of light was the welcome infiltration
I needed to assuage my spirit’s fear
of abandonment.
Years of fear had forced me to withdraw from the fervent shore,
back into the abyss of my America;
tugged at me until I threatened deluge. Within me, a floor trembled
until I became the harbinger of
the end of my era—a long flood stretching
from sea to shining sea.
Away, I slid to the congested heart of the hill country,
the familiar green stucco and arid patches
of my San Marcos; where I had sewn myself
beneath the Guadalupe River into the rice grasses
finally, in fealty, to the mud of my father’s blood.
The rich silence of our many dark deaths inherited
seeping through the partially reclaimed dirts of Texas,
our selves, a diamond rattle, slipping easily
through the skin of the year and across every border.
I crawled, one wheel in front of the other
to the beat of a cacophonous wave
sovereign to the gale and saltpeter of the Mississippi;
the weary of Louisiana’s gulf where from
I know I will never escape. I gathered and gathered
myself, until I remembered my origins
as an ibis, as a lily amongst thorns, as a whale;
until I knew what it meant to come through a wall of water
into the weapons of the world
but undeniably destined to return
to my mother’s bayou—
a slippery salt tincture cultivated
by time and fire. Painting the sweep
of my lungs with songs and poems and scripture,
I combusted back into my body—
my legs covered in
red ash.
—————
Faylita Hicks she/they) is the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the forthcoming poetry collection A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), and the debut memoir about their carceral experiences A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2025). They are the recipient of fellowships, grants, and residencies from Art for Justice, Black Mountain Institute, the Tony-Award-winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Lambda Literary, Texas After Violence Project, Tin House, and the Right of Return USA. A voting member of the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs, Hicks’ poetry, essays, and digital art have been published in or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Longreads, Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, Slate, The Slowdown Podcast, Yale Review, amongst others.