Newly Wed
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in this one room shanty without windows
only one good sack of millet for hunger and no matches I have risen from the bed which is only a stolen sheet cast over straw to cook you breakfast. I want to be good for you. but what do I know of striking flint or bringing anything to flames. once my aunt tried to teach me said lean in whisper your sins to smoke said you could be forgiven by fire. but momma lifted her nose at low labor and I never learned how to burn my secrets. we are not speaking now. momma and I. she has her feelings about this dirt floor shanty with no books and that flea hop bed where you named me woman. I know I won’t be young forever but want forever and I have seen how breast can fall in my family but if I could cook you this millet watch you eat and smile… damn it. this flint won’t spark. you startle awake to me beating the dark rocks together your eyes already keening for something I don’t yet know to call hunger. I say teach me to light a fire you say woman come back to bed. |
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Brionne Janae is a California native, teaching artist, and poet who has left Boston where she completed an MFA at Emerson College, and is headed to Brooklyn. A recipient of the 2016 St. Botoloph Emering Artist award, Brionne is also a proud Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Sixth Finch, Plume, Bayou Magazine, The Nashville Review, and Waxwing, among others. Brionne’s first manuscript, After Jubilee, will be published by BOAAT Press in winter 2017.