After almost twenty years, I have a Cassandra
for a Night Manager. Sharp mouthed, hard face,
a blade for a tongue.

She thinks she knows how many tablespoons
a black woman needs to eat dinner every night,
how many tablespoons

to cut out a bowl of rice from the rest of the bowl,
how one spoon that is unlike the other should do
for a woman who knows the power

a tablespoon wields in the hands of a black African
woman, how on the left, we hold the fork, not like
the Queen of England,

and on the right, the spoon scoops rice, and pieces
of fish and chicken. A white woman manager who
may have never eaten rice with a spoon

all her little life, never held a spoon at dinner
the way people like me do. Maybe she wants
me to eat with my hands.

But how can she tell me without losing her job?
So, she tries to lecture me about my timeshare
doing enough for me

with just two spoons, after the payments were
made twenty years ago, after the skyrocketing
maintenance fees, rising.

She thinks she knows me, knows how my skin curls
under my hairs, how my bones may be really black
like me, how I grew to speak

like an alien or eat like one, the woman tells me
this is all she can do, so I ask for her name. Cassandra,
she rolls her tongue,

The lecture people give without charge to a black
woman with an accent, so, I tell her about the symptoms
of the culturally insensitive racist.

How such a woman who can womansplain another
woman, should not be managing the night. Sometimes,
I see the women ghosts

in my family roaming the dark nights, when the moon
is almost out and darkness comes in pieces
of fireflies, of dead warrior women.

Cassandra, the name rolls off my tongue like okra.
Cassandra, Night Manager, who doesn’t see
daylight in my eyes or in my voice.

When she tells me she wants to come to my unit
to see the spoons, I tell her, no. I do not welcome
an enemy with kola nuts

and spiced pepper, a night manager, who cannot
see how the moon follows us around at night,
how the moon speaks to us,

how the moon wants to open her up to air, to dirt,
to life, how I know the heartbeats of all
the other warrior spirits of women.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Pickled Stardust on Unsplash