» Poetry

I Used to Be Much Faster

Damn the sun, let’s just go. My friend Dee said. So we sprinted, the sweat-soaked air pressing our skin as if a rag in our mother’s hand. This heart hammers. This small heart made to collapse. All I want is to lie like the grasses. But she embraces me with her eyes, arms pumping, I won’t let anything happen to you. Love comes in unexpected pairs. I’m a head and a half taller. Her hair flows along both sides of her shoulders. Parentheses. Pantheress? I am hairless and large. A whale breaching the surface, fins flipping. Fat & light on his feet. Another offered once. I’ve known what it means to swim in shame. To lower my lashes at words placed on the crest of my belly. What is flesh but our ancestors rising from the surface of our skin? My family is built wide and low. The better to submerge. But they made me this floating creature breaching the blue. I have swum so fast, fins peeling, that I smelled the pepper of my elders’ clap from wide, low savannas. I believed my eyes were black until I saw the sun in my reflection. A panther can run as fast as she likes; I only crave the depths.

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Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of National Bestseller, The American Daughters, as well as The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, a One Book One New Orleans selection, which was longlisted for the Story Prize. His debut, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. All three books were New York Times Editors’ Choice selections. Ruffin is the winner of the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the Louisiana Writer Award. Ruffin is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.