Poetry
"Black Female Bodies"
By Cheyenne Marcelus
By Cheyenne Marcelus
I once did a Google search for images of “Black girls having fun.”
I instead found images of Black girls gone missing.
2 Black girls gone missing from campus 2 Black girls gone missing from
church
2 Black girls gone missing from a playground 2 Black girls gone
missing from DC
2 Black girls gone missing from Chicago
and to disconnect the missing from the discovered,
2 Black female bodies
they would often phrase it.
Sometimes one body may have collapsed a few feet away from the other,
and they would be presented as separate unrelated incidents;
as if they were not near to one another,
tethered together by cracked bones and dried blood;
dear to one another,
with families waking together,
filling their bellies with similar contents of soul food;
as if their homegoings wouldn’t be at the same missionary Baptist,
sermoned by the same pastor who is exhausted of funerals.
2 Black female bodies;
the missing girls who were missing too long.
If there were really such strength in numbers
they’d call out to each other
and ascend their way home.
If I avoided the footsteps of all the missing Black girls,
I’d have nowhere to step,
Nowhere to play, nowhere to pray, no school to attend,
no babysitter, no boyfriend, no best friends,
Nowhere to eat, sleep, or shit.
And they never give enough detail
about the soul that has left the Black female body.
They don’t show the communities mourn;
they don’t capture the emptiness of her former classrooms and hallways,
or show a montage of the doodles in her notebooks,
a neighbor on the news saying she was such a sweet child
or a spirited child,
but nonetheless a child,
connecting her to someone’s womb.
I don’t think a decade from now there will be a documentary about each of the missing
Black girls
who were Resurrected as Black female bodies.
No, they may instead make one big documentary
about the epidemic of Black girls gone missing between this year to that year
and how nobody really knew
and we only read news of it in Instagram comments;
perhaps a single docuseries where a handful of the country full of Black female bodies
receive souls and names.
I don’t know which of them will truly get to rest.
I can’t say for sure what God may greet them.
So many missing Black girls
become Black female bodies;
who knows what the bodies become.
I instead found images of Black girls gone missing.
2 Black girls gone missing from campus 2 Black girls gone missing from
church
2 Black girls gone missing from a playground 2 Black girls gone
missing from DC
2 Black girls gone missing from Chicago
and to disconnect the missing from the discovered,
2 Black female bodies
they would often phrase it.
Sometimes one body may have collapsed a few feet away from the other,
and they would be presented as separate unrelated incidents;
as if they were not near to one another,
tethered together by cracked bones and dried blood;
dear to one another,
with families waking together,
filling their bellies with similar contents of soul food;
as if their homegoings wouldn’t be at the same missionary Baptist,
sermoned by the same pastor who is exhausted of funerals.
2 Black female bodies;
the missing girls who were missing too long.
If there were really such strength in numbers
they’d call out to each other
and ascend their way home.
If I avoided the footsteps of all the missing Black girls,
I’d have nowhere to step,
Nowhere to play, nowhere to pray, no school to attend,
no babysitter, no boyfriend, no best friends,
Nowhere to eat, sleep, or shit.
And they never give enough detail
about the soul that has left the Black female body.
They don’t show the communities mourn;
they don’t capture the emptiness of her former classrooms and hallways,
or show a montage of the doodles in her notebooks,
a neighbor on the news saying she was such a sweet child
or a spirited child,
but nonetheless a child,
connecting her to someone’s womb.
I don’t think a decade from now there will be a documentary about each of the missing
Black girls
who were Resurrected as Black female bodies.
No, they may instead make one big documentary
about the epidemic of Black girls gone missing between this year to that year
and how nobody really knew
and we only read news of it in Instagram comments;
perhaps a single docuseries where a handful of the country full of Black female bodies
receive souls and names.
I don’t know which of them will truly get to rest.
I can’t say for sure what God may greet them.
So many missing Black girls
become Black female bodies;
who knows what the bodies become.
