My joy is believing that Nikki Giovanni left her body on this earth and headed to Mars. My joy is believing she is waiting for us and quilting her black-eyed peas. I hope that when I am gone, if humans must go to Mars, it is Nikki’s Mars. That possibility is my joy. Black women have the sense and foresight to leave this planet when it’s time. And when we go, we will be tender with one another. I don’t know how I know; I just know. Knowing that there will be Black women in the future is my joy.
And They Live on Mars
like late spring in Oklahoma—wait. No more Oklahoma. No more children burning for being Black in Oklahoma. Skin thick enough to outlast the heat of bombs—changed by Mars.
They love on Mars like this: No shame in their touch, no worry over what god will leave them behind. Love like the long Sun on Mars’s face, keeping warm when long day turns to long night. Long like the Martian lake they have not named. That lake, where they take one another, kiss one another’s fingers, swim in the freezing waters, learn every inch of weightless bodies. The lake where they braid hair and coat it in red dust, kiss temples when they throb, make each other squirm, make each other hot in deep places in their bellies. Love like that. Love like Mars.
They left for Mars like this: Hundreds of years ago, late September. The way was etched in their skin. They built a ship in an abandoned old crater, long run dry. And the years went by. And the ship was done. And they got in and sang, and the metal shook with their voices, and somebody said “Hush!” And the metal hushed, too. And somebody else said, “Why?”
And the metal asked, too: Why not sing? They were leaving it all behind, bringing all the best of them home. And they kept singing, and the thrusters flared, and they left that planet where nobody looked for them, and they didn’t want to be found.
And you found them, up here on Mars. They ask you this: What made you come all this way? No Earth without us, huh? Well, you’ll have to keep on in your lonely. We’ll be gone again tomorrow.