RedHood
By Aeesha Abdullahi Alhaji
a red handprint, splayed over tattered black canvas,
it sways in the branches.
my brother tells me, see! a star in the wood!
are its wishes worth more than the ones in the sky?
my terror makes useless wishes; wishing I could fly us away,
wishing I could make us as invisible as the tricksters and thieves in the stories.
none of them work.
more stars follow.
the slap and creak of the banners is the only sound in the whole world.
in heartbeats there are a hundred crimson hands, more, waving at us.
they pass us by. we see nothing, hear nothing,
but I fill that procession with every awful story I have ever heard,
so that each banner is held aloft by an accompanying nightmare.
my heart beats like a stone.
my brother has no words for what he sees, but his utter stillness speaks for him.
so many flags. a thousand. more.
when they are gone, we weep in silence.
we weep to have lived, and we weep for home, which with dreadful certainty we know lies on the path the red stars walk.
Bio: Aeesha Abdullahi Alhaji writes poetry that dwells in the space between dream and nightmare, drawing on folklore and inherited fear to explore memory, the body, and the self.
Author’s Note: RedHood: reframes a childhood memory through myth, using red handprints as a way to write around something too terrible to name directly.
