Shakeema Smalls, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Reparations

The birds are talking loudly about the need for reparations.
They say it’s a time whenever their feet touch the ground.

Before their feet can touch the ground, they become stained glass
on automobile windshields, dinner that your grandaddy caught and opened

with the same knife, caught and opened the palm used to sharpen your pencils.
They become the reason I can’t sleep past 7am. And capitalism. They dream of

being half the eco-terrorists we are. I can’t sleep through their jealous laughter
at this ending, they will either say to breathe or not breathe:

breathe and not breathe, anyway—the love handles of wind wrap around
your house and try to fill you, inch by inch, your empire that is not your own

and not a prison but not your own as you read Nkrumah in the garden
and are speared by the biting gnats of the next morning of empire.

The empire comes and becomes and ends the next morning and breaks.
The birds are talking loudly about the need for reparations.

Shakeema Smalls is from Georgetown, South Carolina. Her work has been published in a variety of outlets including Honey Literary, Hayden’s Ferry, Emergent Literary, Tidal Basin Review, Root Work Journal, Radius Lit, Free Black Space, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fruit Journal, and Foglifter, among others. She is a Tin House Workshop and VONA alum. She was also a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow. She is the current Markus D Manley Poet-in-Residence at The Poetry Lab. Twitter: @shakeema_smalls Instagram: @shakeema_smalls