In Attempts To Bring You Back

I found the last thing you ate & saved it. 

---Idc. Idc. Idc. Even when the flies came, I introduced myself

to the rot. Once we got comfortable I said take anything I own, please take it

all, the secrets, promises --- everything down to the very last 

breathe. This poem even, holy ash in the alter. Bargaining means 

never having to say never, so  I asked God to be a God, 

then I asked God to forgive me--- for asking. 

After heaven did not respond--- I laid ear to earth in public gardens,

a whiskey barrel with pomegranates at the bottom--- spilling & waiting until

resentment swayed through & spit the seeds in my face, once she got comfortable

---- I drowned her & demanded this be seen as ransom.

I thought about having a child & naming it after you. I realized

that child would never know its namesake & that it’s not fair ---

to want someone just because you want someone else. ---  Instead

I named other things for you: seasons with the most holidays

--- the color of the sky immediately after it hails, the sound a heart makes

when it is half returned, the first time I won a fight, ---anytime I lose 

anything & the smell a bullet leaves on a person, even

when they aren’t the target.

I drew a circle in the middle of the last street you walked --- i summoned

 a banshee & maintained eye contact. The banshee wasn’t even surprised

to see me there. I am the talk of the afterlife. A joke the myths tell ---silly human, 

who imagines she has something the darkness has not seen before. 

Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland Ohio, where she is the current Lake Erie Siren. She is an avid reader & adores myths & fairytales. Once upon a time she was 16 and competed in a competition called Brave New Voices & from that day forward --- poetry was her happily ever after.

She's widely published & has toured both nationally and internationally (including Canada, Costa Rica and Norway). A two time nominee for the pushcart prize, a finalist for the 2017 button poetry chapbook competition, a 2017 bettering American poet and Best Of The Net Poet,  a 2018 winter tangerine chapbook fellow and a 2018 Poetry Foundation  incubator fellow 

Siaara is a four year PinkDoor Fellow & 2018 Pinkdoor Faculty member. She teen and adult poets. She is a teaching artist for 12 Literary Arts. She is the founder of Wusgood.Black and a reader for Tinderbox & Winter Tangerine journals. In her spare time she is growing her afro so tall God mistakes it for a microphone and tries to speak through her. Her first collection of poems Raised By The Dead is forthcoming in 2019 from Honeysuckle Press