Spring 2022, Volume 32

Poetry by Katerina Canyon

Staring Across the Atlantic

My people were born underwater
In the hulls of slave ships.
My people were pulled from farms in Nigeria
From trade ships along the Nile river
From the rainforests of Cameroon.
My people were tossed in cages
With people who didn ’t speak their language,
But we learned to speak a new tongue
From the end of the whip ’s lash.
We learned the mood of the ocean.
We learned to read the stars through knot holes,
And to sing songs in tune with the waves.
That ’s when we became American.
We were slaves to the British, the Dutch, the Portuguese,
We were even slaves to the Cherokee.
We not only marched the Trail of Tears
We carried their bags, their homes,
Their children on our backs.
We have fought in every single war
Since the American Revolution.
We are not America, but we are American.
As the years passed, we forgot the Baka, the Nok, the Hyksos
But in our songs, our jazz, our blues,
We can hear their ghosts.
That ’s why we are Africa but not African.
We are cultural orphans
Grasping for the hem of our mother ’s dress.

 

 

 

BIO: Katerina Canyon holds a Master of Arts in Law in Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and she holds a B.A. in English, International Studies, and Creative Writing from Saint Louis University. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is a 2021, 2020, and 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee. She served as the Sunland-Tujunga California Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2004. During that time, she started and ran the Shouting Coyote Poetry Festival, and she traveled the country promoting poetry and poetry events. Katerina Canyon’s work has been published in publications such as Meniscus, New York Times, and Huffington Post United States and Germany. She has been a featured poet in multiple venues across the country, including Beyond Baroque, Nuyorican, The Bowery Poetry Club and Chance Operations. She teaches poetry workshops to children and at universities. She has published three poetry chapbooks and two albums. Her latest work, Surviving Home, is available through Kelsay Books. Prior to Surviving Home, she self-published, Changing the Lines, a joint project with her daughter Aja Canyon featuring poetry and art, and can be found online at Amazon. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where she can often be found writing poetry near Meadowbrook Pond.