The enslavers cage the Black girls firstThey lop off the braiding and fingernails whichThey place in a clamped gunny sack with oddments:Nettings, peeled eyes, negro repellant, disintegrated limbs,And assorted mason jars teeming with enslaved menstrual blood,peelings, and scraped labia wounds for surveillance, dr. simsslashes the whistling gorges in the experiments he loved, the waya hottentot scorches in a frankincense of fistulas draping theoperating table Only savageBlackgirls possess a hottentotThese savageBlackgirls buckle under the tup of dysmembermentan unbraiding of the feminine, the braiding, dr sims thoughtbaroque, an aboriginal juju, The elongated tufts from the Blacksavagegirls’pre-owned hottentot, now, fur pelts dressed the shoulders of his waltzing wifeon alpine nights, while Blackgirls these savageBlackgirls, Lucy, Anarcha,and Betsey—who possessed a mauled and ethereal hottentot—preparedmistress’s hibiscus tea and teacakes However, mistress sims wantedsomething more She inquired about these savageBlackgirl’s hottentots,About the incense of the hottentot She wanted to rub it across her vaginato entice and woman, mistress sims craved the smell of the hottentot, anAfrican primrose the Blacksavagegirls possessed, such Blacksavagegirls,Lucy, 17, Anarcha, and Betsey, both 18, did not avow pain, Because theylived through the fear of an ensnared fetal skull gashed in the birth canal,along with insertions of tinned speculums, If, savageBlackgirls felt the terrorismof bloodletting, it was not know to them, The surgical apartheid covens continueto peel back each bark of Black skin, an antebellum monogram whittledinto a napalm whorl, Their imperialized hottentots on oppression tables asa storehouse of balm for white women among lacy sawn and portland stone,This, under the cedar cladding, on the landslide of percolation ponds, canted bays,crossing coves and arched lunettes held by doric piers with the burnt smell ofhottentot and yaa
The History of Gynecology
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- September 1, 2021
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Copyright © 2020 by Cynthia Parker-Ohene.
All rights reserved.
Forthcoming in DAUGHTERS OF HARRIET from The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, March 2022.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Cynthia Parker-Ohene is a graduate of the MFA program at the Saint Mary’s College of California where she was the Chester Aaron Scholar for Excellence in Creative Writing. She is a Tin House Summer Writer’s Conference alum, an awardee of the Pittman Scholarship from Juniper at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the recipient of a scholarship from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also a Callaloo Fellow and Hurston/Wright Fellow, among others. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Yellow Medicine Review, and others. She is a Pushcart Nominee, and the winner of the 2017 chapbook prize for Drapetomania published in 2017 by Backbone Press.
Fall/Winter 2020 47.1
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
The University of Alabama
Editor
Jackson Saul
Managing Editor
Josh Brandon
Poetry Editor
Kelsey Nuttall
Black Warrior Review is named for the river that borders the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Established in 1974 by graduate students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing, BWR is the oldest continuously-run literary journal produced by graduate students in the United States.
BWR publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and art twice a year. Contributors include Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners alongside emerging writers. Work appearing in BWR has been reprinted in the Pushcart Prize series, Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize, New Stories from the South, and other anthologies.
Black Warrior Review is indexed in Humanities International Complete, the Book Reviews Index, and the MLA International Bibliography. ISSN: 0193-6301
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