Ra’Niqua Lee
A Balm for the Body
In memory of Tamir Rice
For now, we hold down this quiet sunset
trail, inside the city park after green
glow swamps the rooftops, and you kiss me wet.
Kiss me black along small places unseen.
It closes after dark, but we don’t go.
Dare patrols to check us from our high swings,
Come with batons and guns to tell us no.
Our pendulums rock in rise and fallings.
They say that land holds memory holds shape
holds water holds old sunken ships holds child
holds toy gun holds water, just cause, red tape.
Kick harder and the chain creaks and cries wild.
Insufficient, we swallow the next alms.
Our love over wood chips and blood white palms
The Blessing and Curse of Being a Pecan Tree
A lattice of century-old pecan trees.
Crisscrossed, the distant parts.
I come to what can never come to me.
Pecan trees might have been strangers
to strange fruit. Too weak to hold pecans
and a person. I thumb rough trunks
November cool. Ahead another tree waits,
same for the left and right, but if I turn,
all that waits is a path. Space
for me or the goliath sweepers that gather crop
by the thousands this time of year. This far South,
the paths don’t run out, and if I called this magic,
akin to being let loose in your sheets, pinned
between you and your mattress? Summer,
you pressed into me, and I slipped from steady,
touched your arm hair as you rose over
me. My fingers rooted in the locs at your neck.
We took turns playing giants. As above so below.
Tragedy is a pecan tree reaching for its neighbor.
Misery is the permanent gap. Horror is a bloated
tongue. It took 100 years for these trees to grow
so tall. All those summers of heat like a tongue
flicked over the hot comb that once kept
my unruly hair straight. You said it was better
to be unruly, and you left.
Misery brings the tragedy, not the horror.
We are better apart, and yet I keep pacing.
One tree to the next, carrying essence and prayers
to age old sentinels, blind and dumb to loneliness
and their own lucky soft wood.
Ra’Niqua Lee is a 2024 NEA fiction fellow, and she writes to share her particular visions of love and the South. Her fiction has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Uncharted Magazine, Passages North, and elsewhere. Every word is in honor of her little sister, Nesha, who battled schizoaffective disorder until the very end. For her, always.