Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Honorable Mention, selected by the NEPC Board
Roaming the Deadlands
His ghost hung in the attic apartment
I was told to bury my face, hide from the naked
Keep one eye open, you’ll know what the forms are
They ask, What did you hear?
Name nothing. We had no sight, silence
our braille as years do what they do: passing,
gifting, scattering…we still don’t know
who started it all off…the first taste of delicious
like the dried blood of meat on tongues
teaching want without why or how. Ghosts hung
along a mapped highway of dead roads, we
became the spirits roaming the topography
What does unfamiliar feel like beyond the senses?
Ghosts of what we were haunting, leaving our skin
of the spode trauma kind
When the Imagined Become More Real or Something Like…
a sinister halo birthing one
then two then something like three
they wanted my motive more than
wanting to expose the girl behind the shouting
More than the way it created
a sinister kind of halo in an abandoned lot
in the hour that pretends seven
I battle with Nyx and Reason
One, two
then something like three
it was now two years ago
300 miles ago, Detroit A Black man stands on the street corner
We go into the coffee shop
We see that man shouting
Something my eyes couldn’t hear
He needs a pencil
Refuse, I say
Lie if you have to, I instruct
I am giving birth to a sinister halo
I can’t hear the tale,
It was about a job, in this area hires people
and they don’t pay them, happened to my daughter
The once there is here
I am a Black woman shouting in a parking lot
Opening my trunk
I am asking for that pencil
from those who spin like solar systems
lights beam into empty lot
See how they watch you open a trunk
those sinister halos oh how they light a lot
Oh how they bounce
off Black skin at night
Shanta Lee Gander is Diode Editions’ full-length book contest winner for her debut poetry compilation, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak in Woke Tongues and author of a forthcoming collection, Black Metamorphosis, that is being published through Etruscan Press. She has an MFA Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford, and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. To learn more about her visual art and written work, visit: Shantaleegander.com.