Because You Were Mine

“We’ve Come This Far by Faith,” in Brionne Janae’s Because You Were Mine, opens: “bullheaded beautiful and black / you be a galaxy […]. ” The addressee is both empowered, and tasked, to save themselves:

if you believe in nothing
believe in you
sing to the child in the well
sing until she unfurls her first
until she sings too
get her out
take her with you

But the poem, coming late in an unflinching collection that tracks brutal racialized and gendered violence, including rape by a grandfather and by a partner, does not end there. The speaker is pragmatic: “straighten your back beloved; nobody was ever promised they’d live.” In “Against Confessional,” the speaker claims,

I carry only a mirror
held at the right angle
that you may see
and see all

The “all” of this book encompasses the complexity of intersectional trauma. In “Love Poem to the Motherfucker Who Broke Into My Apartment,” a survivor is caught between fear and a desire to protect one who “could have been my brother too // frozen a split second exiting my bedroom door/ as if you were the doe.” They conclude, “I wanted you far from me. Yes / but also I wanted you alive and free.”

The speaker themself encounters momentary rescue from strangers, as in “Another Black Elder Finds Me Weeping on the Subway”:

she is only inches from my face whispering
so I can feel her breathe me in and out
her voice a tether demanding I remain
whatever it is god’s got it she says
shaking me like a tambourine before an altar

This unshakeable collection traces a painful and solitary journey of survival while embracing those who are also left behind. To “sing to the child in the well” is to also address those who do not survive, as in a poem dedicated to Devonte Hart, a Black child killed, along with his siblings, in a murder-suicide by his adoptive white mothers. The speaker imagines him on a journey to “collect the bones / of your siblings/ gather them like an artist/ a benevolent god—all praises,” allowing him to “meander slowly / toward eden.”