Poetry: mapmaking by Destiny Hemphill
Every body is a frontier of survival, and Destiny Hemphill’s poem lays the map bare. The speaker builds a life out of memories pinned to her body, to the palm of her hand and to her ribs and to her nose—here, she says, is the path to living.
mapmaking
after a photo by Calhoun & McCormick
you say: point yourself out on a map for me. i take your finger & press it
against the heel of my palm. i say: here is the honeysuckle
that mama never let me put in my mouth lest i think that sweetness
was easy to take. it was entangled in the fence across the church
cemetery where three people with my birthday are buried. & to the heel
of my foot: here is the playground where i would make bouquets from dying
maple leaves turned rutilant. it is where i first learned the beauty of decay.
& to my knee: here is the fog that loomed over the battlefield facing
my elementary school. i suspect my tears come from the same water.
& to my nose: here is the porch where i would eat pecans
with my great-grandfather. the night air would smell of water
moccasins & the mothballs meant to keep them away.
& to my shoulder: here is the cotton field
where my great-grandmother almost killed the man
who thought my grannie’s blood would be sweet
& easy to take. & to my ribs: here are the tabernacles
in tennessee & texas & arkansas
that my mama would make out of closets,
still echoing with the prayers
that have kept me
here.
Destiny Hemphill
Destiny Hemphill is a poet and healer based in Durham, NC. She is the author of the chapbook Oracle: a Cosmology (Honeysuckle Press 2018). She is a 2017 Callaloo Fellow and 2016 Amiri Baraka Poetry Scholar at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program. Her work has been featured in Winter Tangerine, Narrative Northeast, Scalawag, The Wanderer, and elsewhere.
