Ashia Ajani

Ashia Ajani is a Black storyteller and environmental educator originally from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains and the unceded territory of the Cheyenne, Ute, Arapahoe and Comanche peoples. Ashia is an environmental justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network and co-poetry editor of The Hopper Literary Magazine. Their words have been featured in Hennepin Review, Exposition Review, Frontier Poetry, Them.us, Sierra Magazine, among others, and forthcoming work in Apogee Journal and Barrelhouse Magazine. Follow their work at ashiaajani.com.

after the revolution

after the revolution all the white protestors will gather up
their signs and head back to their quiet houses where they

watch murder dramas about white folks killing other white folks
pat themselves on the back for a good job done until the refrain

sticks in their heads like an actual truth. the next day by the water
cooler, ignore the microaggressions and chide them in the safety

of home, in the private space between i can’t believe he just said that
and i don’t want to jump to any conclusions just yet.

in this new history, a death is just a death and we do not
have to analyze its intricacies, all the child suicides are just a matter of

sadness, no mention of the cracked skull of inheritance or the violence that
lingers. what has been broken is healed—all the wounds that

surface from here on out bloom in grayscale. there exists no
place on this earth that has not been enraged so when the fires burn

brightly into the black butterfled night, the ghosts of our sins weep blood
tears, all we can do is pray for some bit of peace until the next

demonstration. hide the evidence, turn on the tv and
watch how far we’ve come.

algae bloom

at the surface is America,
an algal bloom of excess:

attempts to pull heaven from an
ethno-state of sorrow.

we live down here.
orchestrated hypoxia, our lungs

haggard through biomanipulation
runoff suffocates.

the metaphor ends here—
eutrophied.

nutrient spillover, deadly trickle down
too much of a decadent thing

discarded; their rage seeps into
our ranks, our soil, poisoned.

no night complete without
pondering imperialism

fascinated by the trajectory of grief
how easy it proliferates

unquenchable: sludge rich with decay
a latent darkness rendered

stagnant. all the water
got the aftertaste of kinblood.

Lush

and on the seventh day, the Lord sayeth: 
make the most of this blessed mess

I have gifted seasons of the utmost splendor
rich with vibrant days, eliciting internal frenzy  

lush in company of sleek, vivid aspirations, yet
the people dare reject this largesse. 

to what end? dizzy with unrequited desire,
humans search my grounds for a lost Eden.  

the Divine, kind enough to provide
iridescence to produce a cyclical abundance 

yet the work of maintaining such abundance rebuked,
exploited- dredged into a permanent hole of sequestration.  

sad, isn’t it! chaos lent itself to life in hopes of balance
instead, prolonged into madness, zombies tethered  

inextricably to a manmade purgatory. the ghosts remain
famished.  

when you and your brethren beg more, wayward
Spirit wanes back into soil, head buried  

in search of an organism soft enough to cradle the
effervescent goodness of this green Earth.  

watch, as we crawl towards a freedom not yet earned
the strange, sonorous moan of creation driving us forward.

fragmentation  

I can live on the coast no longer.

The cost of living and the sea levels are rising—

so is my mother’s blood pressure.

Her nerves are shot. When we check the weather reports

for some folklore of routine,

the meteorologists tell us that New York City

is now considered a subtropical zone.

The white women in the Village call it “brunch weather”

while Harlem sweats 5 degrees hotter &

everyone n they mama wanna relocate to Denver.

Migration stays moving inward; a sort of

post-colonial colonization or climate refugeeism

they say it’s better to be homeless in California

but even the sun became enraged, sweltered

entire populations from existence

besides, you can’t prosecute a heat death.

Bewitched by the delusion beyond the deluge

These wicked walls closing in closer & closer,

Anthropocene, petrocene, plantationocene—

whatever you want to call it, can a name

repair the stitch? Fingers sink in an enduring wound

spread bloodpalm to broken cells plasmolyzed, bereft.

The open secret crumbling before our very eyes.