“Poem in Which I Should Write About Cain, but I’m Tired of Writing About Death,” a Poem By Diamond Forde
From the Collection The Book of Alice
O instead, a houseplant arching a trellis
of its own strong stems, elephant ear,
Colocasia, what my Aunt Cee called Alice,
ready for the sure mothering
of her own mother. She tended Alice
with the surgical heed of a woman
seaming silver to the sharp ends
of the moon, & even when she yelled at us for
crawling through the jungle-mess
of Alice’s large leaves, when we scattered soil so
far she’d find perlite wedged inside
the treadmill, sometimes she’d still let me
water or cull the gilded curls
of a dead sprout hung like a wrung-out
washcloth, & in my hands, I think she saw
a potential to dig, to muck deep
into the manure of my imagination, to sprout
offshoots I’ll plant in someone else
someday, when I am not afraid
to think of myself as a god large enough
that every heart-shaped leaf dicing light
to dust could beat in my own chest,
& I’ve never made a life, but I’ve reached
into the refuse they make of us,
found hearts hardy as crocus bulbs,
& in this poem I will plant a world for women
where kudzu climbs & is wanted.
__________________________________
Excerpted from The Book of Alice. Copyright © 2025 by Diamond Forde. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
Diamond Forde
Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, was chosen by Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. She has been the recipient of the Pink Poetry Prize, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and CLA’s Margaret Walker Memorial Prize, and other honors. She is a Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow whose work has appeared in Boston Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, and she serves as the interviews editor for Honey Literary. Diamond holds an MFA from The University of Alabama and a PhD in creative writing with concentrations in African American poetics and fat studies from Florida State University. She is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.
