“Ode to 180 Pairs of White Gloves”
smacking that ass
making a phat beat
(the thinking man’s Beyoncé
endlessly sketching
Isaach de Bankolé)
O hair as urgent bulletin
cosmic drifts of hair
emitting important information
O untapped talents and salted bravado
a syntactic turn-on
a paragraphic chasm
stirring up hallucinogenic
invader magic
resembling a hoarded apocalypse
of fetishized resistance
against a corridor of wounds
O honeypot hand in a real
busy honeycomb
watching the bees
suck on brown girls’ legs—sharp
like hustlers or suicidal stargazers
O pink lips first pulling on a Kool
*
“I Have a Method of Letting Go”
Asthmatic child in a house full of smokers, I crawled once
under toxic clouds to find my mother
I was so brave I almost died, or desperate
I wanted her more than breath
I was so small & she could sing
anything alive, almost
She didn’t really know, doesn’t know now—
She is familiar with duty & made me so
I can’t live on that loss
In 1977 a bullet turned my brother into dust
His 18 years here, an invisible talisman we hold in our callous living
Sometimes I think my mother smoked to pretend to breathe him in
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From Anodyne by Khadijah Queen. Copyright © 2020. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Tin House Press.
