Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.
A Gxrl’s Trip Home
by Faylita Hicks
We are almost there I tell the womxn,
clutching the car’s agitated wheel, steering
us between the year and its mourning.
Two viscid stretches of lavender,
they petal and melt in the chase
of my palms—blooming in the backseat.
Flexing in endearing pose, they ride
the glide and release of every yearning
attached to our first few missed exits in Texas:
a first turn towards our buried or burned;
another turn towards our sickled bodies;
a third turn towards our terminal disease: love.
Once friends or lovers or both, we each held death
in the silhouette of our ribs, our many griefs
like blades of grass stretched out all around us.
But our triptych desire, novel as it was in its run
down the sweaty vertebrae of the highway to Galveston,
is now a tale of three once sea-filled bowls—
empty, overturned, and flat.
A parable about how
time gorges on memory,
weather has its way with the heart,
faith fails us all, sometimes.
Whoever we were when we left Austin
faded with the famine summer of our lives,
died of thirst out along the side of the road,
is left to the lengthening night.
No telling now who we will be
once we finally arrive wherever we are going.
We are almost there I try to tell the womxn
still clutching each other in the backseat and crying.
We are almost there. We are almost there.
Hold on. Please—hold on.
Copyright © 2024 by Faylita Hicks. This poem was originally published in A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024).
About the Author
Faylita Hicks (she/they) is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, Hoodoo practitioner, and cultural strategist exploring the intersections of social justice and spirituality. They are the author of A Map of My Want (Haymarket, 2024), HoodWitch (Acre, 2019), and the forthcoming memoir A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket, 2027). A 2025 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow and Definition Theatre Amplify finalist, Hicks contributed to a Grammy-nominated album and has earned awards and honors from Art for Justice Fund, Lambda Literary, and the Right of Return Fellowship. They hold an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno, and have received fellowships from Black Mountain Institute, Tin House, and others. Hicks serves as Chair of the Board for The Guild Literary Complex, Core Poetry Faculty at StoryStudio, adjunct faculty for the University of Nevada’s MFA program, and is a voting member of the Recording Academy.
Queer Poem a Day
Queer Poem-a-Day is founded and co-directed by poet and professor Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Library and host of the Deerfield Public Library Podcast. Music for this fifth year of our series is “L’Ange Verrier” from Le Rossignol Éperdu by Reynaldo Hahn, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission.
