Thresh & Hold

By Marlanda Dekine

Marlanda Dekine’s debut collection is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. What does it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nation’s founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekine’s poems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines and calls to task the Works Progress Administration narratives, modern-day museums, and intergenerational traumas. 

Beyond gospel music, fear, and the stories of generations past, Thresh & Hold offers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy. Dekine remembers, remakes, and brings forth their many selves, traveling far in order to deeply connect to a spiritual home within and all around them, calling: “I am listening to Spirit. I am not dying today.” 

Marlanda Dekine is the winner of the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hub City Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781938235955

Book preview

THE BLACK RIVER

whispered dreamsspanish moss reachedwhen we moved back

to where my parents grew up I was eating more rice than I knew

existed and I did not want to be

up and downthe village is known as Jackson Village Road

I didn’t understandhomewhypeoplewere

speaking to me inhomestories

telling mehome

which of our deadhomeI resembled

homeso many cousins

I hadhomeand so many questions for

God

I have never prayedhomeas much as I

home

home

wonder

home

home

home

I

Look. The tree of our hands is for all.

It is converting the wounds which were cut in its trunk

the soil works

and among the branches heady sweet blossoms of haste

–Aimé Césaire, from Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

ORIGIN

I was born on a fourth Sunday to my first-lady Grandma Thelma,

my dark-skinned roll of hickory thigh meat and eyes

disturbed her. She rubbed Ambi skin fade cream

into my face to bless me.

I heaved for my petrified ma

who would not cry.

My father, my dark-skinned hope.

In his arms, I was cloaked. Beneath stars

my mother’s mothers, my father’s fathers worked,

we were given a French last name, Dekine.

Chartreuse blades of grass grew out of the spaces

between their toes. The musty air filled with songs,

my throat moans mimicking nightingales

from the old-world.

I AM BOUND FOR DE KINGDOM

—after Florence Price and Marian Anderson

My granddaddy Silas was born on the Nightingale plantation

in Plantersville, South Carolina on riverbanks that loved

three generations of my kin, captured

in a green-tinted photograph, hanging in my daddy’s den.

Tonight, my eyes will take each old-world bird from the cropped space,

send them home with their songs and favorite foods.

Look out for me I’m a-coming too

with rice, okra, hard-boiled eggs, and Lord Calvert.

My daddy says if I get out of my car on Nightingale land,

the folks who own it might shoot. My daddy says,

Never leave the driveway.

Glory into my