Hear Camisha L. Jones read “What We Be” from the Disability issue (vol. 29, no. 1: Spring 2023).
An Ekphrastic poem after Beyoncé’s Lemonade
We the exhale
Our confidence
We the pot of greens
Our hands
We the floor
We every grief
We the wait
Our mouths
We the magnolia tree
the submerge
a ripe orange
the salt pork
clean the grit
the sink
fed to us
the wait
fill with leftovers
its sweet
the silence
a vitamin cure
the liquor
give and give the portions
the kitchen’s back door
at the breakfast table
the push on in spite of
sour with thanks
its shade
We sit in a bed of no name flowers
Our thorned feet
Our callused hands
Our voices lifted
planted like roses
intertwined in the moon’s shadow
a blossoming song
Camisha L. Jones is a 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and the author of Flare (Finishing Line Press, 2017), a poetry chapbook focused largely on her experiences with hearing loss and chronic pain. Her poems have been published in the New York Times, Poets.org, Button Poetry, The Deaf Poets Society, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Typo, The Quarry, and elsewhere. For eight years, Jones served as managing director at Split This Rock, a national nonprofit that cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes change. She is a coeditor for a forthcoming anthology of disability poetry with Travis Chi Wing Lau, Naomi Ortiz, and Michael Northen. You can find Camisha on Twitter and Instagram as @1Camisha.
