Supporting the Arts is a Stereohyped series dedicated to your creative works. Send your artwork, poems, short stories, photography, music, short films, etc., to lauren AT stereohyped.com, subject "Supporting the Arts."

Aichlee Bushnell is an interdisciplinary poet and a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Counting Sonia Sanchez and Tracie Morris among her mentors, Aichlee has performed her work on various stages in Philadelphia and New York City. An aspiring teacher, she is the creator of the Brave Star Collective, a writing mentoring program for high school girls in West Philadelphia. Aichlee is also the author of several blogs including Brave Star. Although Philly born and bred, Aichlee is currently living and writing in Salvador, Brazil.

She wrote the poem Elegy After the Flood on the first year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, because she felt deeply disappointed and frustrated by the forgetfulness and lack of initiative on behalf of the government and the American people to respond to the needs of a community that was still struggling to rebuild. She wrote the poem in honor of those voices that have been hushed and pushed to the back of the nation's memory.

Elegy After the Flood

By Aichlee Bushnell

For you
I have cried under blue moon skies of Yemanjá
Floated down sweet gardenias to line the dusty bones
of our great grandmothers on the ocean floor.
They are no longer alone.

Mississippi breezes howl a myriad of patois deliriums.
Do not forget me. I am still here.
Do not forget me.

This cannot be America.
Where is my sister? My son?
Daddy, I cannot swim. I want
to go home.

Home with warmth and vanilla smells.
Home where ghost houses now weep in the dark
in the city of the dead marked with cement saints.
Where have all the angels gone?

I saw one beneath the stairs.
Tangled up under her house like she was
the wicked witch of the East.
No ruby studded slippers just tiny doll feet.
They cannot find her mother.

Young, black, unmarried,
pressed hair and Payless pumps,
working two jobs just so they can eat
and live without crying too much.
She is gone.

X 1 dead inside
X 0
X Mother under refrigerator
X
X
X
X

For thirty years my father rose before the sun.
Bought this house to hold his women,
Mama, my three sisters, and me.
He spent every silver cent for these bricks
That we call kitchen, porch, life.
Where is my American dream?

I have moaned ten thousand requiems for this bird called hope.
Lit twenty five hundred candles for the missing and the dead.
A fu lele ade o, a fu lele.
The storm is coming.
A fu lele a de-o, a fu lele. A fu lele a de-o, a fu lele*
Hear my prayer.

Hear it in the breath of trombones whispering melancholy dirges.
Hear it in the melodies pulsing softly from somber pink mouths.
Hear it in the bitter laughter of traipsing Zulu revelers.
Hear it in the swaying rhythms of mothers dovening at dilapidated levees.

Soon I will be done she said, a sister swallows blue screams
while catching her dying breaths in an attic
pressing her face against the vent for a final taste of sunshine as if
she could still hear Africa singing across the water.

The sea humming some distant ominous memory.

Now you ask me who I am and I remember.

These people are in my blood.
They are in my wishes and my breathing.

For them
I have cried under blue moon skies of Yemanjá
Floated down sweet gardenias to line the dusty bones
of our great grandmothers on the ocean floor.

They are no longer alone.

*Yoruba: The storm wind is coming.