take care of your hands
listen to the audio recordings of me reading the issue here.
take care of your hands
when i reset my altar on the first of the month, the candlelight stood stock still until i called on my recently-transitioned grandma. only then did the flame start to dance. only then did i realize six months had passed since she died. sometimes, grief anniversaries have a way of blending into the landscape before announcing themselves with a sly flourish. once your eye catches it, you’re almost more startled by the possibility of having missed it.
in that time, i’ve been meditating heavily on a repeated phrase that came up during the 2025 Forecast reading i got from Jeida K. Storey as a 29th birthday gift to myself: take care of your hands. a message she said came from an ancestral mother. the questions that came up for me afterwards shaped my spring and summer: what can i hold? what can i make possible with my hands? what do i have to offer? and what am i prepared to receive?
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Izara and i hold the blunt up to our dead homie Dani's lips in the hotbox, their bright smile immortalized in the CD jacket of their memorial mix. i reach through — never past — my grief for (a troubled) reconciliation with my mother, who ignored me for eight months this year, even after receiving news of my grandmother’s death. i peel a clementine and place a portion near the South River, whose cool water flows around sunflowers strewn behind by a prior visitor.
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i turn thirty in December. i originally typed “thirsty” and i think that still feels accurate. i do, indeed, find myself wanting as i anticipate entering a new decade. yes, all while living in the crumbling imperial core as it flails with brute force. yes, i find myself craving song in a poorly-gilded cage with a bottom that threatens to give way from the weight of all it has trapped. as a new personal calendar page prepares to reveal itself, i can’t help but think not just of what my future will bring, but who will be there waiting, if not traveling there by my side.
consider these September interactions: my mother asks me for how much longer? when i remind her that it’s her duty to support and show up for me as my parent. my father asks me who will be there if something happens to you? as he prepares to move halfway across the world with his soon-to-be-second-wife.
meanwhile, the people who have chosen to love me regularly let me know that caring for me is more precious to them than any arbitrary deadline or distance radius could ever be. my beloveds and i fret over our futures together because we recognize the urgency of the times. contradictions grow scalpel-sharp and we know we can’t abandon each other to d/Death by one thousand cuts. still, there is wind and wall at my back where i need a village. strategy stretches thin across a so-called nation.
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We (safety) plan, and God _____. Select the most correct answer.
a. laughs
b. weeps
c. flees
d. sleeps
e. closes a door
f. remains unmoved
g. remains defenseless against misappropriation by the wicked
h. makes a way out of no way
i. works in mysterious ways
j. gets out of our way
k. opens a window
l. suffocates under the rubble/poisoned air/floodwater/etc. too
m. orchestrates the atrocities preceding and obscured by the et cetera above
n. takes on another face
o. loses a bet
p. promises nothing
q. seals our fates regardless
r. resides in us all
s. none of the above
t. all of the above, somehow
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i return the caresses of my lover ángel as we celebrate two blissful years together at the top of July. i feel the familiar ache of arthritis wrap itself around one of my fingers, one of my wrists. i touch the shoulder of the Black elder i've been seeing in hospice care every week on my way into and out of her room. i'm here. i'll be back soon.
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her name is a song of collective struggle punctuated by gratitude. mere hours before learning of Assata Shakur’s death, i looked at the poster of her hanging on my lover’s wall (displaying a quote from her letter to the pope alongside her mug shot) and remarked on the nearly-inconceivable indignity of spending nearly 50 years of her life imprisoned or in exile. not long after came the news that two certain Eyes of the Rainbow had forever closed. sometimes grief’s sly flourish gives you a heads up, preemptively makes you more attentive to what is soon to disappear from the landscape.
if i had to demarcate a significant turning point in my own politicization, it was the moment i read Assata: An Autobiography for the first time. there is life before and there is life after. it forever changed me to learn of an ordinary Black woman doing the extraordinary on behalf of Black life and liberation. to understand how freedom dreams can be made reality, and, of course, how reality is not without its cruelty. her life in Cuba after imprisonment came with conditions, including a bounty on her head.
in her documentary, she says, “separation is a real part of being African in the Americas. in my own case, prison has meant separation. exile has meant separation,” right before confessing that her mother had died that very same day. showing up for the film was her attempt to transmute fresh grief into homage, into some kind of salve against the pain of not being able to reunite with her people during immeasurable loss. what must we make of her absence now, those of us who still live? her lifelong sacrifice demands more respect than iconography. we, too, must find and pursue our extraordinary if we are to venerate her appropriately.
Miss Major, a Black trans movement matriarch, tasted the sweetness of eldership at the end of a life that she worked tirelessly to build for herself and others. i’m talking fingers to the bone to free, feed, and fight for the dolls on both sides of the prison walls. she was a miraculous possibility model for so many Black trans folks throughout time, myself included, especially for her continuous and outright rejection of respectability and liberalism.
my comrades and i had the honor of hosting her at the inaugural Columbus Community Pride seven years ago. it was an extra special treat for her to give opening remarks at the festival after we gifted her a bouquet of roses, a fraction of a fraction of the flowers she was owed in this lifetime.
“Pride is something to be proud of. Be proud of who you are, where you are, and what you stand for. Don’t let these other motherfuckers who think they know what the hell is going on defeat us. Stand strong in who you are, and for my Black girls, give ‘em hell, honey, they deserve it.”
— an excerpt from Miss Major’s opening remarks at the 2018 Columbus Community Pride Festival
and gave ‘em hell, she certainly did. she rests now, hopefully in peace and power as her rallying cry rings true from the Hereafter. she is “still fuckin’ here,” cemented forever in our hearts and memories. tears come easily when i think of these elders-turned-ancestors — both 78 at the time of their transitions — linked not by locale, but by their respective commitments to revolutionary motherhood and struggle. we could only dream to fill their shoes, yet the dream is worth chasing, and we are worth the inheritance.
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when the homes of sleeping families are raided "here" or bombed "there" || when the homes of sleeping families is raided "there" or bombed "here," locality and temporality collapse and merge. our air defies delineation. the oceans concede to no border. somehow, my beloveds and i will learn to do the same to ensure our survival.
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i felt called to gift myself an embodied extension of the ancestral transmission i received to “take care of my hands.” thanks to Nadia’s talent, they brought the vision to life in August by adorning me with a symmetrical arrangement of three cowrie shells per hand (my favorite number) as symbols of currency, beauty, divination, and protection that have endured throughout numerous African cultures.
once home from the shop, i revisited the notes i took on Jeida’s reading to find the line that prompted the refrain and there it was: you must listen/with your hands, sampled for a divination deck featuring Lucille Clifton’s poetry. the line comes from her poem “out of body,” written from the perspective of her deceased mother as a gentle plea to/through Lucille to find her by tapping into other senses and parts of nature. when the dead speak, we have to find new ways of paying attention. like me noticing the greeting i needed in a flickering candle. like me answering the call to extend the lineage of Black feminist writer-ancestors through the ink in my skin and on the page.
Clifton spoke of her own losses, centering not on the ideas of ‘letting go’ or ‘making peace,’ but of sustained communication with the departed.
— Tracy K. Smith
on the final day of this month, i’ll be elsewhere preparing my hands to escort my father down the aisle in a generationally-inverted ritual (that will also be a far cry from how i usually celebrate the Halloween season). i’ve joked with my friends that i suppose i’ll be dressing up as a dutiful dyke. i feel neither excitement nor woe over him getting married again, if i’m being honest. i’m simply committed to being there, and i’ll remain open to whatever the experience may reveal.
what i’m most looking forward to is sitting at the shores of a familiar sea once again, where “here” and “there” commingle, where past, present, and future surge and spiral around each other. i can’t wait to gaze into the vast, swirling azure and locate the fluid possibilities of my next decade within it. i will start by pressing my palms together, opening them to the sky, or submerging them before me in a prayer to beckon my honorable dead while the veil is still thin.
i must take care of my hands so that they are ready to maximize the blessings and alchemize the burdens. so they can touch, write, worldbuild, wield cutlass, seek enjoyment, connect meaningfully, orchestrate more of an already-purposeful life, tend to the dead and dying, and carry it on now. all the rest, i will release to the wind.
sending you my best, dear reader. until next time.
Dkéama
post script
i would be remiss if i didn’t take some time to acknowledge the chasm left behind by D’Angelo’s death after 51 short, mighty years. his music was like water to me. not in the way where it was an essential part of my daily consumption. more so that i encountered him in so many sonic environments, it was effortless to absorb his work. a soulful osmosis. i learned of his personal trajectory similarly: sporadically catching bits and pieces of information on the hypersexualization, grief, and meticulousness that drove him to the point of pulling away from the spotlight. i finally chose to listen in earnest once he chose to re-enter the public ear with Black Messiah, and he made an even more enamored listener out of me. ascended to the heavens, he will remain an eternal emblem of sensuous redemption, divinely-driven devotion to one’s craft, and an undeniable love of Black people. may he rest and be at ease.
in keeping with the theme of hands, Assata taught us that she “[believed] in the magic of the hands” in her poem “Affirmation.” read it if you need to re-enliven your own Black revolutionary faith, and then slide over to complete the webpage i coded years ago as homage to the very same poem.
BQIC, the organization i co-founded, posted a retrospective on Miss Major’s presence at Community Pride & her profound impact on all of our lives.
here is a video of Lucille Clifton reading “out of body” at the 92Y Poetry Center in 2008.
sending gratitude and abundance to all the hoodoos, conjurers, and rootworkers as we bring another Hoodoo Heritage Month to a close!
some herbal juju i’ve been dabbling with this month is the Angel in the Flesh tincture from Goldwater Alchemy, particularly for my dreamwork, divination, and creative practices.
for Black August this year, i hosted a workshop called “Pushing Pens: Epistolary Poetics Against Prisons” at yes please: bookhouse and carespace. therein, i invited participants to reflect on their own letter-writing practices; i defined and contextualized epistolary poetics within the Black August tradition; then we all created a Black August-themed epistolary poem and/or wrote a letter to a Black political prisoner. as you might expect, i brought up Assata Shakur’s writings as an example of epistolary poetics. since her death, i came across an example of an epistolary poem that Audre Lorde (Gamba Adisa) wrote to Assata Shakur during her incarceration. it pulls at the heartstrings much more strongly now.
