Warn her about you.
Hold her like a regular old colonial building,
swept away (in) yesterday’s newspaper clippings
down the Kaveri.
We can boil a little book, sitting on top of Montréal,
and think of other brown girls who are secretly
pages waiting to be burned and blurred with holy water
until they make no sense anymore
warming the city skies with our bodies, tamtams,
warning each other with les bises and hushed words
and shared shade, secret shade.
Rewritten by local standards,
they were going to put French everywhere, and I would love the practice, like
I would take a lover like an assignment
as anything except a cheap substitute for emotional depth.
Bodies aren’t bridges.
Tongues aren’t exams.
i think your cum tastes less bitter when
modeling as a heart of a dual bidirectional thing, less bitter
when I come too – like a viole(n)t moon, a sun setting in the Arctic –
shaking, just watching it.
i ink through a canvas.
“Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it.”1
I think through paper
the shape of a flayed heart,
isolated in a small plastic container
at the Strathcona Building of Anatomy and Dentistry
that one there is mine.
Tea with rape culture means
not looking at (me) the same way
ever again at Starbucks.
thanks.
I’m not something super into fashion,
I’m not someone super into
the tensions we trust with,
snapped shoulders
snapped wrists
snapped fingers make holding(-)pens impossible.
And he visits again, the Algerian taxicab driver –
the bridge between white women’s experiences and my own
and he changes shoreline to tip
to communicate with the difference between being alone and being lonely –
(Did you know, he asked me,
that they call Montréal-nord, Montréal-noir?)
some of us are just little spice packets
waiting to be cooked and consumed
by those interested in ethnic cuisine.
Seriously, it took the longest time, to navigate
negative connotations in an explanation
other than insanity because you’re ugly.
Neither will leave, under the same gaze of someone else in his locket –
Sew a book with me, ink me in today,
so you can drink me in later.
And I promise you, you will never be ever
able to taste anything
other than the toxic sludge of my body in print
I hope my aftertaste burns you from the inside out.
Was to have loved to be?
Was to have loved to be?
Does anyone remember the scene and my body just your size.
Or an island if her thighs are you were me.
A bathtub full of these
limbs.
Ok, hold her.
She was splintered wood and meaning the next time.
Not something beyond a sterilized definition in someone’s dictionary –
(I want me.
*shrug* I am Me, trying to have a space not where they came from,
ironically enough, the neo colonial/orientalist gaze.
“faut qu’tu parles, parles du colonialisme.”2)
Maybe things as always, I have been cut and sold every mo(u)rning.
She bitches about our frigid hearts
closer to each other’s languages in
victorian era times –
when I would have been her servant,
I want to tell her I cannot love like she does
and now I’ve moved back home in the middle of tattoos.
and now I can be a brown woman jury-audience-speaker-lawyer,
and my chest, a court, legitimising the cold diamonds around my neck,
my tongue curved into stone and carbon frame,
a scythe into grass and I fashioned a white serrated dagger
to hold those weeks of summer suicide in a pocket of time,
locked away,
to hold that week of winter worth in every frosted word
that tastes like January.
a scythe like a blade between my teeth
waiting to cut something other than my smile.
this is a wholesale fucking resumé.
- Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell by Marty McConnell http://peelsofpoetry.tumblr.com/post/34524527364/frida-kahlo-to-marty-mcconnell-by-marty-mcconnell
- Occupation Double, Loco Locass
http://www.parolesmania.com/paroles_loco_locass_58033/paroles_occupation_double_1484334.html
- Flawless, Beyoncé
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18dx0p_beyonce-ft-chimamanda-ngozi-adiche-flawless-explicit-official-video_music