“Not despite, you say, because / You’ve been looking in the bathroom mirror / of our Santa Fe adobe house, beneath stained vigas / wearing your orange sports bra / and half-buckled blue jeans”
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“you can’t tell me / to reconcile / all the being i’ve done / kneeling at a pew / lined with past lives / i’ll think i’m there to celebrate / to sing”
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“You are harmless without antlers, / rare amidst hard tusk-teeth”
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“I can see four-leafed clovers in the grass because / I have magic in my blood. / My parents would say it’s because / we were Irish before we were American.”
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“Girls sometimes roil / with fear they say / we’d do anything / to avoid a sting run shrieking / like our mothers but they / mishear buzzing for screams”
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“The meat turned clay when you left. / You kept the eyes, like dried berries, / and wet capillaries still stuck / to your fingers like raw yolk.”
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“Sick of buying tissues, she started to use / two silver buckets she’d found one day / in a neighbour’s abandoned shed, not knowing / they belonged to a magician (now dead).”
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I have seen these hues / bring the deepening of my blues. / Inside the rows and lines of my swallowed up and overwhelmed disappearing. / Inside the measures of solitude that swam through sorrow, seeking something unnamed.
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I braid these waves into a still water crown/ each braid, boxed at the root, a singular wish/ wrapped together like a promise
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“…i was told that if it looked / like this / then / it was wrong / that i would need mending…”
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“They should be quaking.”
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“country sojourner, you gaze at me in rough / lips psychedelic rum, see i live in the old tales / of thick thighed psychostasia. weighting between / the self-actualized fat of my body and the / flickering of french-kissed soul. see i move”
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“the myth is, you and i tell each other we are / beautiful, precious, rare creatures, we are beholden / but we are scarred, i only have one gift: / surviving a horror movie with my song”
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She takes the inherited power of her black femininity, gifted from the one who came before, and her own ability to utilize that power as the slayer, to become the chosen one. “Blk Buffy / the one who destroys things / look at her / she’ll stomp on your pretty packaged life.”
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“And I wonder why / the milk sours. Luck has passed / to other coffers.”
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“my inamorato has tied these weights / to my ankles while he flounders in the foam.”
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“When I’d pictured you (yes, I pictured you / and me with you), it was dead-on: / you wear the expected eyes of exhaustion,”
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the needle skips, you pour more salt. i’m not fucking listening, / i promise. throw scripture into static—rip
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