Poetry, Micaela Francis
Where I’m from cannot be contained / I’m from a liminal space inside of a liminal space: Door of no return / JFK Terminal 5 / grandma’s cheekbones / the intersection of where the waterfall meets the river /
the hospital room I was born in faced central park / my parents drove me back home to the Bronx / where dancehall and dembow shake the block / Patois / Spanish / Arabic / and Twi flitter alongside each other / ethnic enclaves overlapping one another to create something entirely new /
when I was a few months my mom brought me to her home / and it became mine too -
Jamaica: St. Andrew / Kingston / Jacks Hill / Widcombe Road… where my grandparents left the fruit of their “American Dream” / where generations before them tilled the land / sugarcane and rum passing through calloused hands / and where I spent many summers finding myself in the sand and seashells /
At 3 after my parents split / skyscrapers turned into southern sunsets / and smiling at strangers became the norm /
Florida: West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Naples, Fort Myers / mom, why do we move so much? / hiring freeze this / economy that / words that didn’t make much sense at the time…
I was too distracted by beach days / paying for ice cream with loose change / friday night football games / biking to the park / bothering my brother to play games he had outgrown / disney channel original movies / church on sunday / and sometimes wednesday / to understand what she meant /
New York / Jamaica / and Florida swirl through my veins / a diasporic trinity / existing outside of space and trying to contextualize itself in time /
Micaela Francis is a Jamaican-American writer based in the Bronx. She is currently pursuing her masters in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In her work she explores diasporic identity, family history, and metamorphosis of the self. She has previously been published in Dark Phrases, The Sarah Lawrence
Literary Review, and Pastel Serenity Zine. @micaela.___
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