When my ancestors find me again in sleep

my eyelids are crusted in sugar.

 

I molasses into the syrup of them,

poured over muscovado and rum.

My ancestors’ ribs are 

made of sugar.

Siphon the white gold 

from their Black stalks 

dynasty     after luxury.

 

Harvest the sugar cane

in the centre of their backs—

chew.

My jaw to press your juice,

your funeral-pyre boiling-house.

Syrup pours out the wound.

I bleed your blackstrap every month.

 

I need sugar like I need 400 acres of expatriated.

I want sugar like I want armyworm bored into my sweetness.

 

Some of my ancestors were made of sugar 

and that is why they did not survive the Wet Passage.

Mouth grey-gummed and baptismal saliva.

When they dissolve into the Middle Belly

crystallize me on the shore with silver barrel

and English breakfast tea. 

 

Sugar loves my blood

for the way it cakes after boiled.

Cane mill dust makes cobweb of my capillaries.

When I am lonely

I spin my sugar into orchids.

Arrange my sugar into edible tableaus of

enslaved foremother, neocolonized grandmother,

estranged granddaughter—

an Afro-Caribbean nativity scene.

I swallow them whole until next February.

 

Sweetness tastes like Charles, my surname.

White man made sugar baron and

crowns his dynasty with his name.

He cash-crops my honey into sugared inheritance;

our Black-made sweetness exported

to every household in Britain.

Sugar monogrammed with Charles.

My ancestors’ unmarked graves monogrammed with Charles.

Sweetness in the red-brown molasses of a master’s name.

 

Seven unnamed aunts is sugar.

Three named cousins is sugar:

Zaniesha, Kadeishia, Keneisha.

We swallow the same sugar.

 

I lost my father to sugar;

he is too sweet to love me.

The island is our common ground

and we trade mango juice and sponge cake in triangle between 

diaspora, second-generation, and homeland.

Sugar is 20 years since he has seen homeland.

Sugar is I have never seen homeland.

 

I will meet my grandmother for the first time

when she dies 

and comes back as sugar,

my great-niece.

I will teach her how to swallow our sugar.

 

My umbilical cord was sugared

and my womb water was sugared.

My blood memory is sugar.

 

And after I die:

creolize my Black body

with the sugars of my Afro-American, 

my Vincentian, my Yoruba.

A negro by any other name

is just as sweet.