First-Person Prayer for Reclaiming the Body

i have made myself clean:

in the ocean, i washed my feet with all the green-blue salt & i washed my hair with with body-warmed honey;

i rubbed my legs with rosehip oil, my teeth with cracked charcoal & i powdered myself with crushed buds of rosemary and lavender.

i have made myself clean and cannibal now

only for how sweet i taste, only for my black sugar body,

how i lick it from my fingers, how it makes my mouth

pussy pretty,

how it makes my own name sparkle in between my teeth

Accompaniment—Part of the function of poetry, I think, is about reclamation: the reclaiming of both our language(s) and our experience(s) as Black women in Black bodies, particularly when those bodies are queered and sexed and sexualized in certain ways. I wrote this poem almost as an ode to self-care with attention to how part of that process for me is being able to recognize my body as clean, as natural, as delicious. I wanted to note how that, in recognizing the beauty of the body, our names become our own, linking back to June Jordan’s words in her “Poem About My Rights.” I wanted the poem to be about the body and its sparkle, the beauty and the sweetness of it all as well as it being about an infinite and intimate connection to the world around us.