Poem: In Whose Image?

“IN WHOSE IMAGE?”After Wangechi Mutu

Columbus mistakes manateesfor mermaids and on this day in historywe mistake black women for sea cows The swollenmidsections blown out of proportion Born out of amistake What have you mistaken at seafor a grand illusion A black Madonnaholding a white snake in brown suedecoat its fangs like ivory horns ornately piercingeach of her wind torn breasts The pulp sifted intoopen mouths like bellies of ships needing to be washedout When the blood leaves a stain the rain finds a holyway to put us in our place The hairs stand up on myforearms like a sea urchin’s buzz cut and my father hasbeen out to sea for days But how can you be homebefore dark when the body you call home is the darknessitself You should never trust a poem that ends with aquestion Never trust a daughter waiting at the windowfor her father to come home He will have seen thingsat sea Will have held a woman in his arms like water untilhis breath was but a bubble floating upwards in the stainedglass In the back of my mind a crucifix rests its neck againstthe wall trying to wrap its head around a serpent namedEve If I only knew me better I would know I don’t knownothin’ ‘bout nothin’ but cornfields and snow Your kneescannot keep your legs from drowning The only oceanI’ve ever known—the baptismal font on Sunday Waterpoured down on my straightened tresses and the hair on myhead curling into hissing snakes tangled in the priest’s shakyhands his jerking fingers a flicking tongue When helifted me up from that water pupils wide and white as milkI don’t know who or what he thought he saw Anything buta mother of a God

Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, currently works as the Librarian for Nerinx Hall. She is the second prize winner of the 2016 James H. Nash Poetry contest and a finalist for the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, Missouri Review, The Offing, Poetry, The Poetry Review, River Styx, Solstice, TriQuarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Vinyl, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem as well as Callaloo Fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. This piece originally appeared in The Offing.

Photograph by Attilio D'Agostino.