We Are Not Wearing Helmets

let’s make a book a palace to dance in 
fruit to feed our young
let’s make a continent a kite let’s make a drum
a knife a hymn a torch a chant

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s We Are Not Wearing Helmets uses a wide range of forms, including landay, zuihitsu, kimo, and pantoum, at times drawing on Trinidadian dialect, to enact surprising twists and turns and transformations. In “Let’s Make a Drum: Let There Be Singing,” the speaker declares:

I become tree stump when I awoke from sleep my hair was
     straw my poem
was the small child killed last week
I flew became purple martin ate mosquitoes and small fish

With hyenas, hamerkops and a whole hothouse of flowers, a rich variety of flora and fauna connect poems meditating on violence and loss, as well as desire and homecoming. In “Lemon Verbena,” the speaker dreams of “zebra chickens scratching soil,” and of humming gooseberries, “their eyes bright parasols of sleep.” “Call Her Delphinium” describes the aftermath of a fight between two lovers:

she stared at me
I looked away

and thought—
dot her eyes with asters
braid her body into two leis of blue delphiniums
my lips bitter stained marigolds at the garden of her thighs
the neon skeleton of my teeth calling her filthy names.

We Are Not Wearing Helmets honors a messy web of emotions where sadness and joy live side by side. Braiding is a recurring motif that makes us see how growth is often about a slow accumulation of wisdom and balance. “You Braid Your Hair,” charts the process of grieving the loss of a mother: 

months later you unbraid your hair pack a weekend bag
life wears your drunk cave like a tin crown
hollow and pretty         you fill the corners
of each room with bitter bright marigolds

The collection also celebrates Black women’s poetry and poetics, honoring the influence of Audre Lorde in the lyric essay meets prose poem, “A Woman Speaks.” In “The Home You Left Long Ago,” dedicated to Aracelis Girmay, the speaker considers “a poet exquisite her mouth a topaz city / filled with hummingbirds, blue herons, and marigolds” who reminds her of her own mother, and whose “words lilt bamboo stalks propping up your aching heart.”