Message: i feel a sense of displacement, and my surroundings feel barren probably due to race, heritage etc

I dug this firepit with my own hands. 

This place where all the winds from the four corners meet. This place where a machete is a memory of hunger. This place where clay & ash is the recipe for a name. 

When I was a child I used to carve rivers into dry bark & pretend there was nothing hollow in us. 

For a while, I could only be one face, 

which was the mask I had to wear, which was my breath. 

These days there are no feasts to open the drums for, everyone is chasing a shadow, 

even you, after this poem. 

My mother is a brown woman. 

I take her brownness into a hall full of brown people who have no map. 

If I speak of my city, that too is a knife resting between my teeth. 

Here, in my city, silence is how you shout underwater. Do not trust the man who calls a desert 

a place of endless harvest. 

Do not mark a word when he passes— 

if you look close you will see night turning its face from you. 

Child, this is how you know not to call out. 

You do not leave fingerprints on your breath. 

How do I know this? 

I was born beneath the tallest tree. 

But do not write this as my truth— 

I swear my mouth in the wind is still the language of run.