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The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (IV)

freedom a fire on the river

  • Airea D. Matthews
  • Laylah Amatullah Barrayn
  • September 2023
  • Art, Photography, Poem
  • Intervention

for Mama Chola, Mami Wata, Yemaya & Oshun


New Brittania, 1773

Children slipped tools to the middle-deck
men, who swung refrains against iron
freeing our limbs to overtake the deck
hands. Rebellion riffed ecstasy under
pour-drenched doubt, if only a matter
of long minutes, a short hour at most.

Regardless the outcome, we forswore
return to underbellies but promised 
some part of earth our ash as black
powder set aflame. The brilliance of 
fire on the skim of river! Elements 
existing where they aren’t supposed

to be—their wills explosive revolution. 
And so it is with liberty as with alchemy;
two strange sciences, indeed. Relating
to freedom a fire on the river is as good 
a burial site as any mud casket red clay 
dare cake over our unenslaved vessels. 

previous | next

  • freedom Mama Chola Mami Wata Oshun rebellion revolution Slavery Yemaya

Airea D. Matthews

Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores  longing, desire, and inheritance with power, insight, and intense emotion. New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews’s experimental forms as, “Fugues, text messages to the dead, imagined outtakes from Wittgenstein, tart mini-operas, fairy tales: Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.” Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus (Scribner US and Picador UK, 2023), a memoir-in-verse that is a bold poetic reckoning with the realities of class and race and their intergenerational effects.

For her writing, Matthews earned a 2020 Pew Fellowship as well as the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People award. In 2016, she received both the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Poetry Ireland, The New York Times, Georgia Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry, American Poet, The Rumpus, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and elsewhere.

Matthews holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an M.F.A. from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an M.P.A. from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an associate professor and co-directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented the Lindback Distinguished Teaching award.

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

As a documentary photographer, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn focuses her inquiries on the cultures and identities within the global Black diaspora with a special interest in memory and the lived experiences of women. Her monograph, We Are Present: 2020 in Portraits, was recently published in collaboration with Magnum Foundation. Barrayn is currently completing a book on contemporary Black photographers. She holds a M.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

‹Also in this Issue›
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (X)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

In this / metaphysic, not one of us dies from want / or lack / or saving / or flight...

  • Intervention
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (IX)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

I would often be stricken silent until I traced / My blood gaps...

  • Intervention
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (VIII)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

Hunger hungers still. We, / resurrected, warm under / a familiar flame...

  • Intervention
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (VII)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

There is no terror, at least, / of unknown, glottal tongues.

  • Intervention
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (VI)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

Epigenetic rage is an avowed, / deserved grievance. But to what / end?

  • Intervention
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (V)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

We / abandoned earth with dignity, severed / our ties and breathed in salt.

  • Intervention
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (IV)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

...Elements / existing where they aren’t supposed / to be—their wills explosive revolution.

  • Intervention
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (III)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

...a small gap, a bridge— / an invitation to some unwrinkled past—

  • Intervention
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (II)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

...the sea swallows / itself whole. Breaking the weight of us all...

  • Intervention
  • Art, Photography, Poem
The Recurring Dream of the Water Mothers (I)

Airea D. Matthews , Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

Water holds danger, epigenetic memory, / & I refuse the murky, shallow currents.

  • Intervention

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policy

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