Scorched Earth
By Tiana Clark
“Scorched Earth” by Tiana Clark is the third-place winner of the 2023 Previously Published Poem Prize, selected by Palette editors. We’re honored to share this powerful poem with you.
This poem was first published in The Map of Every Lilac Leaf: Poets Respond to the Smith College Museum of Art.
Scorched Earth
after Kara Walker’s “Buzzard’s Roost Pass”
Black breasts split within a civil
war battle-scape. Black breasts hewn
and hacked off like discs of liquorice
butter patted over a field of white men at war.
Sherman’s army penetrating Georgia.
Sherman marching to Savannah,
not giving a shit about slaves.
Does anyone know where a black woman
is and is not the linguistics of a landscape:
raped, mastered, controlled, conquered, hoed, mined,
fucked? Kara, why did you cut her up
like that? Kara, you be knowing
how the blacky body becomes
and is becoming the violent earthwork
of shadow and fissure, such discrepancy
of ink, and I’m looking at your black silk-
screen thinking about the beginning
of Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”:
Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie…
Kara, have you read this poem? Kara,
what about that torn forearm above the frame
reaching back in the negative space? Her head
stippled with cannon bursts, cut flower bombs
piercing the profile, dead silhouette. Kara,
would you still not answer me if I asked you
about longing? About your process? I get so tired
when people ask me about this one poem that I wrote.
The truth is: I lied. Did I have to be there
for it to still hurt me? Am I allowed
to conjure the possibility of pain to protect
myself from the pain? Imagine
the shape of my trauma like blacker breasts
pointing in different directions across the gorge
(of my partly disembodied body).
Did it have to happen for it to be true?
The truth is: I felt like I heard it.
The truth is: I still pull away from my lover
in public. That’s my real life. I don’t trust
affection. I don’t know who’s looking
and not looking at me. I don’t know
who is going to read this either, but I want
them to like me. Kara, I want you to like me.
For that to happen, should the poem
end with my hand reaching for you, too?
Should the poem end with you touching
my black beasts? Whoops, I meant breasts!
Sorry. Oh, sorry for saying sorry so much.
Do you still want to touch my blackest
breast after I’ve apologized? And let’s say
I keep apologizing and then I make
this mistake again…will you still want
to touch me? Do you want to see me
touch me? Sometimes, I touch myself
because I don’t know if I exist. Once,
a white guy in high school asked to see
my brown beauties, kissed my chest for hours.
I didn’t want to do it, but I did it,
and I’ve done that so many times.
Does that make my breasts powerful
or fierce or political or, or…
is there anything new they want to say
about the art of black femmes?
If so, will you say it now? I’m exhausted
and bored by this list of lazy adjectives.
Say something new and then shoot me
in the face three times, or better yet, hang
me in my own cell and say I did it. I dare
you. I double dog dare you. Do it—Do it!
No one will believe that I was murdered.
Do it. Kill me. No one ever trusts a black
women’s mouth. Kara, what that mouth do
in that lithograph stuck inside a locked room?
Singing Stratocumulus clouds—I guess
the weather ‘bout to change. Oh, I see
one fang in her mouth. I got sharp teeth
like that too. I leave a mark when I bite
myself. I draw black blood and paint myself,
my black bitch head over my black bitch history.
When I was little, I prayed to God for tig ol’ bitties,
but they never came, instead I’ve got small boobs
and large areolas that I’ve just now stopped
being ashamed of. It’s important to be specific
when you ask God to win the war or who’s
gonna win the war. Which side? All the same
when the war has always been your body
on the brink—I love my black breasts! I love
my black breasts! I love my black breasts!
—originally published in The Map of Every Lilac Leaf: Poets Respond to the Smith College Museum of Art