We Have Always Been Here
South Carolina’s Marlinda Dekine testifies to fierce love—for the natural world, for self, and for a grandma’s lessons.
WILD VIOLETS
Look for me on your walk in any Carolina woods.
I wrote to you from memory into a future where you exist.
Someday you will want a relic from someone who has
lived our kind of life. We were queer here,
in the South, and everywhere in the world.
When rustling pine cones fall at season’s change,
we are there in the tree’s bough,
curling edges of straw outward like a cat’s ear.
We hear you coming before we know you.
We go deep and way back.
We love fierce. Someone could yell
in our faces for hours about Hell.
We’d lean back in our seats, and rest for a spell anyway.
Anyway, some will say hate was worse in the South.
Our heritage is beyond queer.
Some will lie about what is on the other side of their need
for somewhere worthy of our arrival.
You will not be greeted with open arms.
You will hold yourself and play God.
Queue angels to dance when you enter rooms.
If they don’t tell you about us, listen to the wind.
Search the ground.
We have always been here,
signaling in the purple spread of wild violets.
COMING TO LIFE
I was a child unafraid of anyone
who could turn a basketball
between my legs into a bad thing.
The people here made me
a hushed-mouthed, close-legged girl.
I was a child until my first bleed
in 7th grade stained my jeans.
I sat in the bathroom wondering if I was
bleeding out. I turned womb-shamed,
breast-restrained, and twelve-years-old. I wanted to hang
loose like my boy-bodied cousins,
jumping backflips, shooting hoops, running shirtless.
Before I came to life, I rested
beneath the ground, next to my dead
grandma on the other side of black.
She told me how to live
longer than her heart did,
said not to get caught on the other side
of anybody's fist. She told me people here would try
to keep me in their pockets,
instead of seeing a wild, free world.
She told me to remember what keeps me whole
isn’t the same as what keeps me alive.
Now I fit in my lover’s arms,
though unprepared for them.
My curves love her curves,
her hands cup my breasts.
I am alive where women loving women’s
bodies are abundant.
I worry about when
we all will be killed.
When called a dyke
on the court, I blossom
knotweed, quack grass,
bindweed, and thistle. They speak
my names, sow my seeds,
I keep coming back,
placing my mouth to chalky dirt:
You can't dig me.
I lay my body down. Then,
I am everywhere.
Marlanda Dekine is an author, consultant, and poet from Plantersville, South Carolina. She is the author of Thresh & Hold (Hub City Press) and serves as the Poet Laureate for Georgetown County Libraries.