The Body is Also a Colony 

Poetry by Simone Reid

after Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”
​
​You feel the most like a body after sex
in the nude of your skin, bare and brown to a nub
splayed out as firstly a body, and then,
in a much more secondary consideration, as a mind.
You come to see yourself in the shrinking eye
of a seed at once born and also destined to die
that cowlife waning, pregnant with emotion
negro nails of bone and wide stitching
subject to the whims of this or that structured deprivation.
That's where you're most aware of yourself as a thing
responding to stimuli, pheromones, pulses of emotion
a cartography no different than that of a rat
the crawl spaces of the heart caked with blood
equally as lucky to be alive as to be freshly fucked.
Yes, you are just a body in a bed in a town
on the rooted crust of earth. But this is only at night.
In the day the body is held under the cover of the mind
held on an earth covered in hegemonic constraints.
You are beginning to see that some men are human
and the rest of us are simply bodies, and this you learn
from Wynter, that there are whole swathes
of the world converted into nothingness, conquerable
substance snorted into the rotund snout of industry.
People profane and wet in vulnerable containers
like the body of a man you saw, body untethered
from outline. Body after bulldozer.
There was a you before, but you are the you after:
you in the bed, a bird nesting on the circular bough
of the tree that is colonialism, that one dysgenic branch
that infected the whole of this crust.

Simone Reid

​Simone Reid (she/they) is a cultural worker. It’s her aim to hijack the written word for our anti-imperialist struggle. Her work has been recognized as a winner of an Academy of American Poets 2023 University Prize and Bandung Books' James Baldwin Centennial Zine Contest. Their poems appear or are forthcoming with Obsidian, Protean Magazine, Poets.org, Off My Dome, and HOOT Review. She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU, supported by the Lillian Vernon Fellowship.