I watched a woman with long blonde hair and gapped teeth sprint down the street. She was barefoot at first but then the road started to smoke before rolling into her toes. The black and yellow tar became her shoes. At the corner, there was a man chilling with his hands in his pockets. When she got to him her face crumpled and there were tears in her eyes. You did it again! she screamed. You ghosted us. You made my baby cry! And then she put him on her back and ran around the block so fast it turned into yesterday. I didn’t realize it at first but then I noticed I was wearing yesterday’s clothes. And instead of sitting on the steps, I was in the check-out line at the supermarket. She had somehow knocked all of us back to last Sunday and I have to relive the scaries, wash clothes, make spaghetti for the week, and listen to my mama talk about how she doesn’t want to go back to work cause she knows they’ll be short again and she’ll have to work twice as hard.
Header photo by Dani Wojtalewicz.
Niesha Okere is a writer from Philadelphia. She studied journalism at Temple University, and her work has appeared in Variant Literature, Afropunk, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook Blue Girls is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
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