THESE SOFT THINGS
blissful arms womanly arms skinning them selves like apples i am open to interpretation so taste me lick me eat of my flesh and appropriate my suffering it was so long ago that i was walking streets made of conditional love but now i am too filled with fear to walk anywhere with my blissful legs, my bruised arms these soft things leave me happy being alone and untouched leaves me so happy
w e r q for lunch i eat hot cheetos & read most days i am too poor & sleep deprived to pack a lunch i put on my best wig paint my eyes crimson i wash my hands in the employee bathroom like ritual still fingers stained red i am the only register o p e n xx always a servile thing wore my best wig for you today, ‘suh didn’t you notice do you like it wore it just for you xx i’m not allowed to touch their hands when they pay me no, this is not written in the handbook call it an unwritten rule people like me just know these things even on my best behavior i be too corner store to touch i pick money off of the counter i am not allowed to make eye contact with them see we don’t even use the same bathroom xx i bet they don’t think i know anything that i’ve never read a book in my life just sell them programmed with answers a servile thing o p e n xx i play girl for 8 hours i play blk for 24 xx this barely pays for my rent but we free now in the union guess that means something to y’all xx i don’t sleep to dream i’ll play dead if you want me to a servile thing even in my dreams i am not blk enough even in my dreams i am anything but
AFTER WE SHOOT A BREAKDOWN
IN THE MOVIE OF MY LIFE The director pulls me aside and says they are thinking of rewriting the script. Our original plan was to stay as true to real life as possible but we think it’s just missing something. I am exhausted. We have just filmed the part where I pull out my hair and punch myself in the face as my mother watches. Like what? I ask. It’s just. We know you’re telling the truth when you say this stuff happened. But we don’t know if the audience will be convinced. We think we need to add something to the story to make you behaving like this believable. I touch at my bruised peach of a cheek self-consciously as they continue. No one runs out into the street just because. Or cuts off all their friends out of boredom. There’s got to be a reason. We need to write a scene in that explains this whole thing. It’s not enough to say that your head works like that. It’s not realistic to say that you’d ruin everything around you just because you can.
f.lux
get pretty lonely before I pull skin over my eyes one parent loves me even if I’m lying regret text sent in my little window just know you are so my person right now
BEG
a man barges through the screen to hook his fingers in my mouth. i’m a fish market. i’m flattening into the bed. rolled out. cooking off the rotten bits. his boot heel’s a fork in my tongue. i’m dimpled. gilled. asking for a god who wears bones slick with pity. asking to be bent, taken by firelight. smelt from iron. pierced through with spokes. a wheel for a head. a garage for a mother. i want to ask the ones who crave a soft thing to tie up if they think of ham, wake up covered in glaze and lick their own shoulders, scald their tongues on their cunts. i’m a skillet overflowing sticky til the bourbon burns off. i’m the menace. i’m the menace. i’m the mother of stink. question: how does a ruined girl yield the way a knight yields? whose pipeline am i blowing up, exactly? if you ask a man to drink from your faucet, do you become him? i pull my man atop me and ask to be buried in brick but beggars can’t be shepherds. he’s a reverse cowboy. a slinging zookeeper. i’m the beast rattling the cage, asking for slaughter.
Queered Ghazal
When the man on the subway refers to me as It It becomes a tunnel without sound, a dark pit. I fall in rein back my pride, chew a bridle of spit-- teeth bite hard to spurn my wild tongue’s fits. Friend says I must be doing something right if no tits, a buzzcut and no prick bring me hate speech in transit. I chuckle I shrug I have a seat, I sit. & dream up a palace where I’m King I fit. I’ve been craving wanting love, wholeness, but then, I feel it-- a wild orchard of peaches blooming from one pit.
lament
I don’t have a name to call you I walk up and down the dark avenues and the air is thick with growing things the last flail of bloom before the spring mellows to summer and my eyes grow used to the violence of green
Get Thee to the Big City!
I’m garden hungry these days. They told me I just needed a bar so I tried that but I have a vision of a greenhouse I can’t shake. No, I don’t know about the separatists. And by that, I mean I truly don’t know. All I know is that sometimes I wear a baseball cap and a muscle tee when walking down the street and all the people stare and I think something precious in me gets overexposed and burnt. I dream about a place with different dirt. A landscape energetic and vast. Dream of a place where I’m not watched instead of a place where I’m watched in the right way.
But you can’t have my money.
–Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, in conversation with a Black Lives Matter leader & you can’t have my phone. slide & divide my nothing no more. play my beats or eat my cake in the bathroom stall while your wife pour it up & oh she can’t have that no more neither. can’t have my rows in your head wired down with my cousin acrylics & DAX. can’t have my sidewalks littered with my dead once called your kill that’s my head. can’t have my beats & I can’t emphasize that enuf my mix tapes my CDs my Motown recording studios my Bird my Prince my Prince my Prince or my Pryor or my long ass dick or my sweet pussy poppin’ quit daydreaming you fuck about all the shit you can’t have which continues to include my arms, Bernie Mac, Frida Kahlo, a fat ass, James Baldwin & the word “twerk.” sheeyt. imma be here until a good age to die talkin bout all the shit of mine ain’t yours. but fuck it. im brown & distinct. laid out in the sun. only getting more black. with your green in my bag. & your blood in my blood.
you look good in green
Dream about you throwing me out of the window. There are flowers, we are twin brothers. Bodies transparent, looking for the moon In the same place it was when I fell asleep. We forget to keep the windows open and I hear you in the kitchen, asking nothing of me. Informal existential crisis, deer on my front lawn. Hand slapped to floorboard, big soft red flowers falling. Clothes to wash, knives on dinner plates. Mutts asleep in driveways. The vines growing into my skin will leave green scars, you’ll rip them from my back and plant them in our yard. Head down in the shower, Water into, window falling out. |
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