Cannibal
i don’t blame
the wide hipped
women
for eating their men
i don’t blame
them for frying them
flour and lard
salt pepper paprika in
black skillets
grease popping sizzling
with the rhythms they miss
i don’t blame them for making
meals of the men
who’ve gone missing
the lost ones dry humping
a beer bottle’s bottom
the wayward ones
caught in the fishnets of a
mistress
the dead ones
cradled in a casket’s palm
i don’t blame the
wide hipped women
for serving their men on sundays
in southern fried pies
cuz everybody gotta eat somehow,
everybody
The Declassified Files of the Sorority of
Chemically Straightened Heads
The following is to be read carefully, then burned by curling iron.
| I. By the time you are seven you will believe that you are ugly because your hair is bad. This begins the initiation; you will know. II. Soon after, you will be plucked; stolen from a random Saturday, carted to a nearby salon. And there will be mirrors, stools, and tools scissors with curls still attached irons peeking from miniature stoves, mud colored gels, lucid creams, toothless combs, sticky sprays, helmets of heat, bubble-filled basins, plastic rods, greasy clips and brushes with more hairon them than heads III. The foul smelling cream is God. You will fear it, bow to its’ magic and lye become enslaved to its ability to press your strands into submission make stubborn spirals flat after minutes of menacing. | IV. Surrounding you are the grim lipped gossips, the women who share the blister sick knowing that the more sizzle, pop, and pain the longer lasting the style V. Black hair is Ritual. Sorority. A hazing that hurts. An induction into a sisterhood where follicles are pressure cooked to maintain the status quo. VI. Perhaps we should blame the women who raised us. The lipsticked sadists who stuff our self-esteem in corsets; shape our worth with brow pencil; teach us we are only our hair. |
Sirius Black Speaks About His Time In Azkaban Prison
(a sestina)
prison has a way of turning time
inward. it’s an irreversible magic
eating away the edges
of a sane man’s will.
there’s no warming a cold that crawls
inside linen. lingers as if invited.
sometimes I’d succumb to dysfunction. invite
it to imaginary tea. ask if it’d wear tomorrow’s time.
but my sentence was stubborn. a crawling
creepy thing capable of unraveling the magic
of a phoenix feather. will
sorcery to a suicidal edge.
Azkaban stands on the crooked edge
of silence. the predator invited
to a festival of prey. a cinder block’s last will
& testament. a clock bewitched to ignore the time.
my innocence was my last bit of magic.
a reminder I still had courage enough to crawl.
escape begins with crawling.
unsteady steps edging
from impossible to maybe then magic.
beware the man with nothing to lose; he invites
madness to dinner to pass the time.
I was that man. holding my wits in my hands, hoping a will
to live hadn’t abandoned me. prison will
melt away memory. hold the heart hostage. watch seconds crawl
by. There were times
when my smile would toe the edge
of a Dementor’s kiss. when laughter would invite
itself inside the core of magic
memories are warm elixirs. a magic
the cloaks and cold could never will
away. when I was falling face first into darkness, I invited
Moody’s wisdom in for a chat. His pragmatism crawled
through my misery, pushed doubt from the edge.
Prongs appeared when I needed to invoke a joke a time
or two. We were mischief managed, invited friendship and magic
a map of footprints, time, and will.
I am the crawl, the memory, and the edge.
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