Bloodcurse

All the women in my family are crazy

My mother wails so loudly the glass in the shower breaks,

A banshee on the loose,

Chaos where there should be calm

Her mother kicks and screams,

Her silence somehow more deafening than the two,

A leech,

Always siphoning energy from those around her,

A vampire,

And maybe it’s the vodou

The crazy

A curse of the bloodline

Passed through our women by the generation,

Strings unfurling,

A restless lunacy,

Encroaching the surface

Genius mixed with madness,

A curse so intricate that no one can separate the two

Because maybe its a curse of the bloodline

And no matter how many doctors we see and pills they shove down our throats,

You see our women,

Our women are crazy

...

Years ago my people must have done a great wrong

For us to be cursed to feel trapped in the mind

The one place that is truly inescapable

three women on the island chanted in threes about the women that took their

men and had them by the trees and they took the blood from under the men’s

nails and they danced around the fire, howling at the moon, spit in their palms

and wiped it in mud. of blood and flesh and bone, this bloodline will never feel at home.