I got a stank ass attitude
because you tried to kill me.
Still, I am the baddest bitch in here.
Diamond yoni. Carbon-based funk & it’s everywhere.
Video vixen-bad. Thick with the stuff my mama gave me,
her mama gave her. It’s cyclical, this survival. My gap-toothed gait bending
the corner. Bow-legged Athena, if this story needed a white goddess to exist.
Let me compare myself to my black ass self:
a stillborn summer=roadkill=every deer gnawed through=peepholes where my breasts should be
How easy it is to eat through the faces
of black girls with your weapons.
A flesh that don’t crack
and yet____________.
Here I am. My bottom lip split down
the middle. You save the fat you want
for yourselves. Your daughters pickle my
mouth in a jar they keep on the nightstand.
What did slavery do to y’all
to make you treat me this way?
I almost wonder & then I am
distracted by my own brilliance.
Pink lotion slides down the side of my neck,
I’m sweating—running hard, fast and away from elegy.
If I die in this jail cell no, I did not kill myself. If I die in this jail cell no, I did not kill myself.
If I die in this jail cell no, I did not kill myself. If I die in this jail cell no, I did not kill myself.
[The understood, implicit et cetera of this list.]
I am trying to mend the impossible wound and I seal it
in cocoa butter. I’m blasting Lil’ Kim in the rain. So much
coconut oil on me, the bullets miss. I’m slick as fuck.
You mad you can still smell me breathing from here?
Today’s other work is “Fat Fuck” by Diamond Forde.
