Cynthia Parker-Ohene
The enslavers cage the Black girls first
They lop off the braiding and fingernails which
They place in a clamped gunny sack with oddments:
Nettings, peeled eyes, negro repellant, disintegrated limbs,
And assorted mason jars teeming with enslaved menstrual blood,

peelings, and scraped labia wounds for surveillance, dr. sims
slashes the whistling gorges in the experiments he loved, the way
a hottentot scorches in a frankincense of fistulas draping the
operating table Only savageBlackgirls possess a hottentot
These savageBlackgirls buckle under the tup of dysmemberment

an unbraiding of the feminine, the braiding, dr sims thought
baroque, an aboriginal juju, The elongated tufts from the Blacksavagegirls'
pre-owned hottentot, now, fur pelts dressed the shoulders of his waltzing wife
on alpine nights, while Blackgirls these savageBlackgirls, Lucy, Anarcha,
and Betsey—who possessed a mauled and ethereal hottentot—prepared

mistress's hibiscus tea and teacakes However, mistress sims wanted
something more She inquired about these savageBlackgirl's hottentots,
About the incense of the hottentot She wanted to rub it across her vagina
to entice and woman, mistress sims craved the smell of the hottentot, an
African primrose the Blacksavagegirls possessed, such Blacksavagegirls,

Lucy, 17, Anarcha, and Betsey, both 18, did not avow pain, Because they
lived through the fear of an ensnared fetal skull gashed in the birth canal,
along with insertions of tinned speculums, If, savageBlackgirls felt the terrorism
of bloodletting, it was not know to them, The surgical apartheid covens continue
to peel back each bark of Black skin, an antebellum monogram whittled

into a napalm whorl, Their imperialized hottentots on oppression tables as
a storehouse of balm for white women among lacy sawn and portland stone,
This, under the cedar cladding, on the landslide of percolation ponds, canted bays,
crossing coves and arched lunettes held by doric piers with the burnt smell of
hottentot and yaa
from the journal BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW
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"The History of Gynecology" interrogates the brutal American history of reproductive health as propagated by apartheid doctor, Dr Marion Sims, during the 19th century. The instrument known as the speculum used during gynecological visits was created by Dr. Sims using enslaved women, Betsy, Anarcha, and Lucy, as test animals which caused vesicovaginal fistula and rectovaginal fistulas without the benefit of anesthesia.
Covers of the new books by Donika Kelly and Phillip B. Williams, The Renunciations, and Mutiny, respectively
 
"I interpreted some of the work in the book as willfully enacting the messiness of memory, like what is the symbol and what is real, what is an image and what is an object, am I supposed to have an emotional connection with a passage or is it more there to decorate the poem to set a scene."

via BENNINGTON REVIEW
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Cover of Emily Kendal Frey's book, Lovability

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