she fled from mahogany-hued skin dark velvet in winter and through spring summer skin, coated like black beans.
she cried under her bed comforted by the cold of the linoleum the children on People Street said
you can’t see coal in the dark.
autumn skin, like eggplants they say the midwife dyed her skin purple black. oh what a curse!
her sun-shined fairy begged her to bathe mahogany-black-bean-eggplant-shaded skin in a beautifying balm, sacred like holy water
sacred like white skin.
She was fleeing from skin sprinkled with black spices from Haiti’s womb “she’s like the bottom of a frying pan visible in a blackout if she smiles.”
like night without the stars.
she creamed her face with toxic butter anticipated change embracing the mirror unveiling skin to expose flames and splendor
soon, her skin was textured like scales of a fish. black ghost knife fish. she unpeeled soaked-black-bean-skin, for compost. for her dying wild orchid
tears scalding pink raw flesh.
she fled from her skin shunned her sun
and now, she is homeless.
Long Island, NY, June 13, 2011
***
Yolaine M. St.Fort, a writer of Haitian descent, has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Long Island University. Her thesis was a novel titled My Shadows in the Mirror. She’s had her prose and poetry published or forthcoming in Downtown Brooklyn, Prose Ax, Calabash, Vwa, Poetry in Performance, For the Crowns of your Heads: Poems for Haiti, The Caribbean Writer, Torch andThe Haiti I Knew, The Haiti I Know, The Haiti I Want To Know. Hear Their Echoes is her second novel. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories and a poetry manuscript. She teaches English at Edward R. Murrow High School and sometimes adjuncts at LIU. She is the adviser for the school’s literary magazine called The Magnet. She enjoys mentoring young people who are aspiring writers.
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