Muscle Memory by Semilore Ola

I braided my little cousin’s loose bouquet of hair once and

my great aunt said I was a natural.

Behind me now in a salon a woman with a headwrap

yellow like yolk

works hard at the nest of my protective style,

making sure all the skin

in my scalp is pulled back and restrained and

knotted,

then braids and braids until she finishes

and it all makes sense to me.

I am unsure if I will be able to see or move a muscle

in my face for a few days but

I know her hands remember the frantic finger movements

since before birth,

moving quickly to make a living and preserve the culture

dissolved into her

from inside her mother’s saltwater womb.

We must have been born like sea turtles,

crawling our way to the ocean,

palpating the sand underneath our begging bodies as we go,

or like chicks scrambling

to break out of a surrounding unknown darkness

and quiet,

emerge through egg oculus

born knowing

when to push our fists through openings or use a

nail and precision

to scratch our way out and

survive.

We soak for days in our own preserve,

skin potent

with the smell of coconut oil, argan oil, and shea butter,

pawing at a yolk of yam paste,

puppy eyes swelled wide. We know how

the chicks sing

in their huddled sleep.

Weaving a life of your own together by each

parted trisection

is both a profession and natural instinct,

hands hard at work

twisting hair into larval pantheons

and naming ourselves worthy

of survival.

As she smears oil along my hairline, I remember this

preparedness

is biological fitness, that when both

black

and a woman

we are still made to build, to

survive.

I do not know if we came to be through Genesis or the

Chicken or the Egg

But through you I know what the word

            alive means.

The woman with the yolk headwrap trims my braids and

determination colors

neural dapples into the oval

mangoes

of my cheeks. Sprouting are bruises rouged in

branching buds of new birth

across the parted sections of my scalp,

nerve endings wrangling

just above my skull

to be let free.

Semilore Ola (she/her) is from Irvine, CA, an OCSA senior, YoungArts Writing Finalist, and editor of Inkblot Literary Magazine.