They say you are no black girl for any sort of hair except black hair.
They say you should go kink, wear your natural.
They say you should never go braid for braid has no philosophy for black girl magic.
They say you should have no weave and wigs cause wigs shows the generation of your slave mothers.
You are a threat carrying all their legacies, carrying all the womanhood, carrying all their slave ships in your bushy hair, carrying all this history in the root of your scalp.
Your hair black girl is a magic, just this voodoo will keep you a black skinned girl.
Ugonna-Ora Owoh is a Nigerian poet and model. He is a recipient of a 2018 Young Romantics/Keats- Shelley Prize and a 2019 Erbacce Prize. He is a winner of a 2019 Stephen A. Dibiase International Poetry Prize and a 2018 Fowey Short Story Prize. His recent poems are on The Journal of Compressed Art, The Malahat Review, The Matador Review, The Puritan, Frontier poetry, Crab Fat Magazine or elsewhere.