turn to sugar Diana
Diana you turned
Diana you stay turning
Diana want me to stay while she do all the turning
Diana want me to say
turn to sugar baby come back
Diana want me to stay turning to steel
Diana you stay turning your own way
on your own time Diana girl
turning your face
Diana still turning into her own girl still
be honest
the same girl been there all this time
yes i know damn Diana stay turning
Diana could you girl just pick a side
Diana you stay looking out of the mirror telling me
circles ain’t got no sides
Diana want me to say
sweeten your orbit girl
turn this way this time
turn to sugar baby come back
Diana want me to stay while she do all the turning
Diana swear i’m turning to steel
Diana think i can’t come back
on forgetting Diana when i cannot see the moon
the northern mountain soaks up night like ink
until there is no discerning where a mountain ends
where a night begins
like Diana and me after a time
one thing happens
then it happens again in another way
like river water and river water a second later
like lunar revolutions like Diana and me like night
we are both beneath the same spring sun
sunk deep into desert dust both and i am
already gone but with so much work to do
all this forgetting ahead of me
forgetting rivers streaming
down risen plane of belly spilling over rim of eye
forgetting moonlight flooding silver shrouded sky
forgetting round flesh until only scattered bones remain
to parch and dry to blanch in desert days and years where the abandoned spread like time
the owls start naming the night their own i hear one
snatch a ground squirrel from its life
it cries out at the clench the surprise
and i imagine fur and talons bone and flesh
beginning
where the other ends
the serene fleet wings of night
i remember the fragile breath the surrender
the fleeting heartbeat of the hunted and hunter
all the same
Ian-Khara Ellasante (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans-nonbinary poet and cultural studies scholar. Winner of the 49th New Millennium Award for Poetry, Ian-Khara’s poems have appeared in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, The Feminist Wire, The Volta, Hinchas de Poesía, and elsewhere. With abiding affection for their hometown of Memphis, Ian-Khara has also loved living and writing in Tucson, Brooklyn, and most recently, in southern Maine, where they are an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College.