Cento for Breonna Taylor & All the Black Womxn We’ve Lost
Come celebrate come celebrate that everyday PUT_CHARACTERS_HERE_ that everyday something has tried something has tried PUT_CHARACTERS_HER to kill me to kill me & has failed & has failed PUT_CHARACTERS_PUT_CHARACTERS_PUT_CHARACTERS_Oh something has tried & failed? PUT_CHARACTERS_PUT_CHARACTERS_/// Sisters, I invoke you— PUT_CHARACTERS_PUT_C_Let’s gather in poem & lay to rest those …
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Grief for Breakfast: An Obverse
Today I have grief for breakfast— reach my tongue out of my mouth & lick my own tears. I’m keeping the whole of me. I call up a friend and we talk about black woman paradise— somewhere between starshine & clay. We lay there undead rest in the peace …
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Scripted History (Rx Hx)
Lithium I was nine when I began reading prescription labels. My mother kept the lithium in a slender cabinet beside the refrigerator. Either of my two brothers or I could have grabbed the bottle when reaching for the salt. I appreciated the cadence of the word, lithium. I repeated it with …
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The Red Dot That Ends the Sentence
(a micro memoir moon cycle) When you get your period, says my dad at his house across the drafty, finished attic, let me know if you need to purchase Kotex or something. I stare at the floor, the southern sun shining through a four-pane window. I am 12. I am …
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Inheritance: Erosions
On the train, I dream my soft limbs fly over suitcases, rainbow faces of men looming like balloons. I wake to the station’s cries, Mama’s cool hands shaking me, metal and iodine in my nostrils, soap sheets melting on the floor, fans whirring. Summer like a crushed grapefruit. Mama’s dry …
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All the Binding I Can Offer
for Tania Here’s the thick paste some kids used to taste in kindergarten. Here’s the glue we later spread over our fingers and peeled off like a second skin. Here are Sesame Street band-aids, ace bandages, arm slings, and Sharpie-signed casts. Here’s some tape: Scotch, double-sided, masking, blue. Here’s the …
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