Poetry

We have a yard full of drifting dandelion
DNA because I read that pollinators
depend on them. Though, when I went to verify
this internet truth, I read that dandelions are more
like snack food instead of true sustenance.

Much can be accomplished in the pregnant
pause, in the gap between wish and warrant:
at such intervals, I studied her brunette crown

and the pale travel of skin along her hair’s part,
uneven as a homemade envelope, and the little
black boots beneath her cloaked ankles, resting

on the far side of the davenport: small mute feet,
clutched together like darkly burrowed mammals
asleep in winter’s decay of leaves.

Dr. Freud of the neat gray beard and muffled
sighs, the dark pressed suits and Ascot ties:
he promises, Mother, that the sharp pains
of all last summer—what cuts across my face
like sharded glass—will subside and with them,
my cough, if only I will talk freely of the fears
that crowd in, upon me, in the narrow dark.

by drea brown   1. on the eve of this new year, in the middle of a pandemic that brings daily surprise and death, i am safe. the only human in my house that needs to be fed, though the stout black cat nibbling my heels would say otherwise. tomorrow there will be plenty of …

Ours, it turns out,
was neither the world
as will, nor reverie—

engines full throttle,
instinct the piston,
strife the fuel.

When it’s over, I wash
prayers and curses out of my hair.
I stuff them into a pillow.
I sleep.
There are no dreams.
I’m not haunted by the lives I take.

In my dream, we’re all
in bumper cars—
some blue, some red,
some a mix of orange and yellow.
The cars have huge front
and tail ends, like a ’59 Cadillac,
except they’re encased in rubber.

it means son who is of my right hand
it means that the son, who let’s face it,
has been ignored until now, is stuck inside
a telephone booth. He is being used and
taken into the back freezers to trim raw
chicken he is slicing off the wobbly bits
being picky and calculating if the hen’s
breasts are worthy with his right hand he tests
himself the left one could go on forever and he
wouldn’t come like a king

the glass woman is an empty feeling and an enactment of power
the bubbling up of a spectacular nasty
the pink velour fabric that cools the hairs on your thighs
the hairs that stick out of the black tights and itch so damn bad

You bring out the emerging QTPOC poet in me.
The only fits in a three dimensional Venn diagram in me.
The she hasn’t taken an English class since high school,
who does she think she is, in me.
The woman-loving-woman, yes also married to a man in me.