record 10268.
1. There is a raven at my door. She is carrying my innocence in her mouth, a Bratz doll
wrapped in brambles and aloe. She is impatient because I have not collected it. I’m sorry / I
had forgotten what it looked like
2.
3. I grew tired of wandering glassy plains.
4.
5.
6.
7. I have known what it means to take the sun between my teeth and turn it over in my lap.
After a while, I welcomed the flame / and the bruises / and the thirst.
8. I fell in love with a man who built me a home / out of his body and set himself on fire
because I was inside it. I know not how love blooms / but how it / leeches.
9.
10. I am trying to remember everything I’ve ever / owned. I am trying to remember anything
that ever felt like mine.
11. I will not wait seventy years / to thaw
12.
13. I had to learn to eat the wild fruits of the forest. To meditate on the crickets’ song. To let the
earth / and only the earth / sustain me.
14.
wrapped in brambles and aloe. She is impatient because I have not collected it. I’m sorry / I
had forgotten what it looked like
2.
3. I grew tired of wandering glassy plains.
4.
5.
6.
7. I have known what it means to take the sun between my teeth and turn it over in my lap.
After a while, I welcomed the flame / and the bruises / and the thirst.
8. I fell in love with a man who built me a home / out of his body and set himself on fire
because I was inside it. I know not how love blooms / but how it / leeches.
9.
10. I am trying to remember everything I’ve ever / owned. I am trying to remember anything
that ever felt like mine.
11. I will not wait seventy years / to thaw
12.
13. I had to learn to eat the wild fruits of the forest. To meditate on the crickets’ song. To let the
earth / and only the earth / sustain me.
14.
|
Jin Nong. Plum Blossoms, 1757. Album of twelve leaves, ink on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
|
dezireé a. brown is a black queer woman poet, scholar, screenwriter, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, Michigan. They are the winner of the Betty Stuart Smith award from the University of Illinois in Chicago, where they will pursue a Ph.D. in the fall. They received their MFA from Northern Michigan University, and often claim to have been born with a poem written across their chest. A Poetry and Non-Fiction Editor for Heavy Feather Review, their work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOAAT, Anomaly, Winter Tangerine, RHINO, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. They tweet at @deziree_a_brown.