Muzz Crick
By Eisa Davis (’99-’01)

I float in a basket toward the Pacific, hands
blue as huckleberries. This air is too sweet,
this cold water a thin, foul milk.

The woman who bore me wrapped me,
gave me to the green of the Navarro,
named me silence. She prays

this river has studied time
and will never turn back
her secret skin, the mark

that stretched into life.
Forgiveness is an insect
that may one day draw my blood.

Catch me, I ask the black power lines,
defying the fog's quiet shroud. What is
a motherless daughter but pure will?

The river turns to molasses.
With a sharp bank through high shams,
I am born into a new language.

From Bulrusher by Eisa Davis. Copyright © Eisa Davis. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author

Eisa Davis is a writer-performer whose work appears in the Role Call, Step Into A World, Letters of Intent, To Be Real, and Everything But the Burden anthologies, as well as numerous hip hop publications including The Source. Eisa has received fellowships from the Van Lier Foundation/New Dramatists, the Mellon Foundation, and was the MacDowell Colony’s Thornton Wilder Fellow. Her acting highlights roles in in Adrienne Kennedy’s June And Jean In Concert, Athol Fugard’s Valley Song, Blues For An Alabama Sky, and appearances on Law and Order, Cosby, and The Wire. She is a lifetime member of the Actors Studio, a resident playwright at New Dramatists, and an affiliated artist at New York Theatre Workshop. A Berkeley native and Harvard graduate, Eisa has written for the Oxygen/BET animated series Hey Monie, and has performed her original songs throughout New York and on the Showtime series Soul Food.

Copyright © 1997-2006 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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