POETRY

Transubstantiation

By Jubi Arriola-Headley     VOLUME 52.3
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Blackness is innovation on a received form.
                              —DAWN LUNDY MARTIN
​
The nerve of you, to think you could vesper
hogs’ hooves into feast. That hymns
could be coaxed into hip hop. That wool
would kink & rope & lock into something
resembling God. That you could stand
the lash or the late shift without
wilting, spirit legacy from the spaces
between the words, speak in a voice
that booms, not breaks. Hope. Fix
your face to smile like your teeth
wasn’t butter yellow. Be better
​than bitter. Be roiling in joy. Be.


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JUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY (he / him / his) is a blacqueer poet and first-generation United Statesian born to Barbadian, or Bajan (pronounced B A Y-jun) immigrants. He’s a 2018 P E N America Emerging Voices Fellow, an alumnx of the V O N A / Voices and Lambda Literary communities, and a second-year M F A candidate at the University of Miami. He’s currently working on his first collection of poems, Original Kink, in which he unmakes the masculinity that binds him.


VOLUME 52.3