A Summer Solstice Spell for Prideteenth

A note from adrienne maree brown: Junauda is a delicious person who makes every conversation a space of revelation. Poet, creator, filmmaker, and writer of poetry and YA sci-fi queer romance!

Be thirsty for yourself,
Your wet-feelings-soaked self
you been thirsty for so many others
seen oasis in them
ventured (escaped)
from the shores of your own wetness,
your own waterfalls,
tidal waves, and delicate delicious depths

Mmmm鈥� just be honeyed
waywardly spiral
within your own insides and
chaotic cliffs and backwoods
that whisper all of the shadows
and all of the dreams

Dreams are falsetto in the forest and
gospel at the shore.
it makes sense, when you show up unexpectedly,
over-dressed and dressed to kill.
You wanted a long catwalk from bush
to oceanic orgasm splash.

You take off the coat and fling it aside,
a silk and layered rhumba of ruffles
a long train of drama to be rid of,
in a decided drop off your shoulders
and that was only the beginning.
(Excuse the ominous tone, but heed it.)

The coat: sauna heat, a balloon of warmth and
handmade by your grandmas on both sides,
when they first arrived in this country.
15 years apart and 2,000 miles away, via St. Croix, via Trinidad.
Maybe they felt feelings?
Emo, melancholy island girls feels
Maybe their feelings were erotic and plump and secret?
Or a blaring collective knowing?

We retrograde to shores
they were told to leave,
because someone said
dreams are better
away from the wetness,
in the chronically distant, dehydrated oasis.

This catwalk sashay literally took 400 years,
We arrive and sit
neon-lit in the moonlight,
nude, goose skinned
and there is
a big jar of water with mango slices in it,
goldenrod
sticky yellow sweet
in the mouth, between the lips.

You know how long we gon鈥� drink that water?
Pour it over the head.
And suck more down our throat.
How thirsty is we?
How many eons?
Splash and pour the water down the chest
and tummy and down the pussy and ass crack
and it tickles as it cleanses.

Walk waist-deep into the water
and start wining and let the saltwater
succumb the accumulation of things that don鈥檛 belong to you,
a panic attack inside of
the jazz hall of a heart chamber

But make it xylophone and steelpan聽
re-home the graveyard and keep the music,
a sweet, soca, a quadrille, a humming.

Finally
wandering
floating
in your waters.

Junauda Petrus is a creative activist, writer, playwright, and multi-dimensional performance artist who is born on Dakota land, West-Indian descended, and African-sourced. Her work centers around Black wildness, futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, spectacle and shimmer. She is the author of The Stars And The Blackness Between Them, winner of the 2020 Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award.

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