The cleaver splits skin. I break
the fruit along its fault line, do not anticipate
dozens of black seeds slick
as eyes, at least twice
the size of roe, at least tenfold
the size of the pencil-point eggs embalmed
in my body, waiting for a chance
I forestall month after month. Folk medicine says
eating these seeds would destroy
an unwanted life. They buckle
under my teeth, little bubbles
of pepper, bitterness I do not expect
from such sweet flesh. I could
down them all. I could dry them,
grind them, season my food.
I could lay them to waste
down the drain. I could plant
them, condemn them to death
in a soil too hot and dry.

Sometimes / I dream that I killed / your second husband. / There is blood everywhere / in the dream / in the bed / I wake bleeding between legs // I am still / your little girl.

At ten, I was so in love / with Giles Corey when / I read that he told those sonsofbitches where to shove it / when he wouldn’t let them have him / when he kept shouting, “more weight” / I could do that too / I knew / I would have told / your husband to keepswinging.

But then / I read Giles / killed his wife with witch trials, he killed / the farmhand too / & I realized / I will never be / the violent man to take a stand / I will never have / my violence / erased as long as / there are people like you / to redeem people like him / I might as well be thewitchstupidbitch / your husband named me.

Could you ever / really / forget / that we jumped state lines to hide / on those days he hailed too many/ fists through drywall, screaming our names, digging for a world where / he hadn’t married a woman with / two daughters made / from the parts of other men / a world where he hadn’t married / a woman / at all.

Giles Corey / was crushed to death / for his willfulness / well / me too / ‘more weight, mother fucker, more weight.’ / How can you unlove / a violent man/ ? / Or, how / can you tell me that he wasn’t?

In those dreams / I tear fingers / from knuckles, pop / eyes, cut knees / I make him // small/ almost small enough / to fit / in your mouth, / small enough for / you to swallow / for you to choke. / It happens so fast / that / I can’t even hear you for- /giving him.

The cobra is known to eat one meal that
then sustains her for weeks at a time.
This single hunt a declarative act of 
overindulgence.

She’s well aware what it is to have 
scales stretched, ready to burst, something sickening.
her body announcing 
This Is Not What God
Intended.

Gluttony is a sin advertised on the
thighs of
girls who do not
need to slither beneath the brush.
Who wear their skin
like it’s still got spare thread from sitting
on the throne at the top of the food chain
clinging to the inner corners of their knees. 
Soft, like worthiness. They are not a
blight or a curse or a tumor or
something else it is 
only natural to shed.

When the cobra sees a mouse and
thinks nausea before hunger, those are the 
good days. When her hood hangs loose around
her tendons, those are the good weeks.

How easy it must be to swallow
without the word Binge, its meaty question mark.
This gristle of how much better you could be if you had
a little willpower, dammit, getting 
caught between your teeth?

How often does the cobra play with her own poison,
when is she bitter that any other body can go down so quick.
God, hateful enough to
make her resistant to her own toxin.

Does she imagine her limp body,
cold blood no longer 
coursing through plump veins,
and mourn the footprints circling in avoidance?
No passerby marvel at her beauty,
the somber elegance of this body
that chose to stop breathing.

How small a corpse is as it fades
from memory, the quietness in describing
a dead girl as beautiful.

The cobra at night, caught between
watchful white stars and earth she is not deserving
of, dreams of ripping her forked tongue
further down its divide until
she is only two halves.

She’s wishing to create one half width
of trail disheveling sand, but more so
to find herself within a smaller coffin.

In the meantime, she slips out of a topcoat
of skin, praying this new flesh is better.

when i meet my third-and-a-half boyfriend/my number one dating priority is SOCIETAL ACCEPTABILITY/he is a model slash actor slash retail associate at abercrombie and fitch/HOT DAMN SAYS ME IN 2004/my puka shell necklace glinting over my artfully layered gap tank tops/he checks alllllll the societally appropriate boxes if you know what i mean/and i hope that you do not

you know how sometimes when you preface an ex/you start by disclaiming the at least they didn’ts /and it says so much about what they did/like/he never hit me/but

my new boyfriend is saying things out loud at my smiling face/i am grateful he’s a human being in the same room as me/because i am 19/i call him refreshingly honest/like there’s nothing more romantic than the phrase/“i expect regular anal and will get it elsewhere if i need to”/which, by the way, is a very silly ultimatum

you know how sometimes your boyfriend’s name is chris/and his roommate is a cop named kris/but with a k/and you pretend like that’s a super funny story/and you pretend like being alone in their studio apartment with them does not make your skin crawl/and pretend you agree borrowing real handcuffs for sex is totally hot/until chris shows you how much it isn’t

it is april and in two months i will be diagnosed with severe mental illness/i wonder what his excuse will be/chris is seeing his ex behind my back/he thinks i don’t know because i don’t say anything/because he and i are now facebook official/chris being tall/cheekbones being CHISLED/we are so compatible he says/i am learning compatibility is compromise plus a man doing what he wants/and the months invested in this cardboard cut-out are just the price i pay for looking less lonely than my friends

you know how sometimes your boyfriend uses the n-word in front of you/and you ask him maybe not to/and he thinks it’s funny how ridiculous you’re being/and societal acceptability starts to seem like an elaborate joke you’ve been playing on everyone you meet/and what can you do except freeze the smile/when the only person laughing holds the keys you need to leave

To those that boycotted because Michelle Obama was named the spokesperson for Subway healthy eating campaign.

Call her monkey,
mammie,
pickaninny.

Call her common, 
not worthy of sitting on white throne

Call her black ink blot in your 
psychological exam,
call her tar baby blues

Bitch.

Call her negro, nigga, never made it

Call her heretic
Call her communist

Call her black cloud reigning over white sky
Say that nothing black will ever guide your tongue
that no one the color of soot and sawdust will ever tell

you what to put in your mouth.
Well I seem to remember, Massah’
I seem to remember how we
stirring wooden spoon,
mixing magic in kitchen,
mixing fried freedom in forms of lard- smothered dough
and fat back, how we ham hocked our way onto your dinner
table, smothered peas and pork chop, peach cobbler
slithered our necks into your dining room.

How we collard -green glided across plate into mouth,
spicy scrambled egged and flap jacked on your fork,
hot watered corn bread coaxed our way onto your table cloths,
and you ate every bit of us.

You sopped up our syrup biscuit with butter 
and molasses, drowned us down with tooth-aching sweet tea
and you loved our sugar.

You licked us off your fingers and begged 
for seconds. We, the cook, the server, the dishwasher,
the background music to your meals
singing, “food so good, stuck my foot in it”, 
singing “all my sweat and spit went in that soup”
and you ignored our forthright song, 
your bellies full with greed.

We have been the decider of what meanders 
into your cotton mouths for centuries, you smug snake.
You have been tasting our sweat and tears-
jagged Jehovah notes floating into every recipe,
been tasting our sorrow and sincerest hate.

So take a seat at our table. Let us fix you one final plate
of harsh reality. I hope it goes down like gumbo glass slivers
so when you start to boycott, when you warm your throat to speak
you will feel how deeply we rest on your tongue.

i fall into the opening between subject and object 
and call it a condition of possibility. 
when i speak only the ceiling listens. 
sometimes it moans. 
if i am a body let it be the sound his lips make. 
there is no word in my language for this. 
sometimes my kookum begins to cry 
and a world falls out. 
grieve is the name i give to myself. 
i carve it into the bed frame. 
i am make-believe. 
this is an archive. 
it hurts to be a story. 
i am the boundary between reality and fiction. 
it is a ghost town. 
you dreamt me out of existence. 
you are at once a map to nowhere and everywhere. 
yesterday was an optical illusion. 
i kiss a stranger and give him a middle name. 
i call this love. 
it lasts for exactly twenty minutes. 
i chase after that feeling. 
which is to say: 
i want to almost not exist. 
almost is the closest i can get to the sky. 
heaven is a wormhole. 
i first found it in another man’s armpit.
last night i gave birth to a woman and named her becoming. 
she is four cree girls between the ages of 10 and 14 from northern saskatchewan. 
we are a home movie i threw out by accident. 
all that is left is the signified.
people die that way.

why didn’t you teach me
gave me a lamp
of holy oil
but wouldn’t help me
find the way
lost on those
Sundays
wasn’t able to form my lips
around yiqirta
quickly enough

why did you let me feel ashamed
to roll that r
sweet as tej on my tongue
let me feel as though
I had to smooth over the edges
of my name
as you had done yours
as though the syllables
of the horn
would cut the mouths
of those who learned to pronounce them
on a different body
as if to say
“don’t trust them with it
we will claim it before
they do”

but each glossed Meron
that escapes your lips
feels more like a conquering
than a claim
a flag on that r
that is not our own
but with each glossed Meron
that escapes your lips

I mourn

I mourn for the Genets
the shape-shifters transform
G into J name as smoothed
as their hair, their blouse, the dollars
they sent home
whenever they could

I mourn

I mourn for the Merons
who walked into that beauty salon
in Addis
looked up beyond their crowns to
faces unfamiliar
a message to quiet their curls
their skin
their names

I mourn

I mourn because it is sacred
pronounce each syllable
let it come to your tongue
with the strength of buna
the warmth of chai
the power of berbere
let it command the space

it deserves

say it
say it right
it is sacred

she seeped into the earth

reborn as iris

bloomed places within her that his violence

could not reach

sucked into her own beautiful

flimsy piece of life

she vowed never to wish for anyone’s departure

only that they be sucked

into their own beautiful

flimsy piece of life

reborn as poppy, a sleepy sort of power

the kind that lulls

a kind of tincture, a balm, a honey

made from sleepy flowers

maybe the problem is too much poppy

not enough water

she won’t put cut flowers in water

they are dead already, she says

why prolong the inevitable

she would rather be a death doula

than a Dr. Frankenstein

cutting the head off a chicken

to pump blood into its neck

it’s not pretty

hang it to dry, use dead things

for decoration

they tell me I killed a child once

it does not linger in a vase

of stagnant water in my mind

the women in my family carry / secrets
in their mouths like cyanide / teeth, ampoules
full of fatal / poison to be bit in two / before
anyone else can get to them / hold themselves
cautious / like their bodies are loaded / guns
and they have itches they can’t / scratch
without their trigger fingers

the women in my family serve / bitterness
over easy / lemon yolk soaking into toast
spread / with a smear of sorrow so butter
cream / you can’t believe it’s not / pour black
coffee since the blues caught / them in the
breakfast nook where / they don’t tell
the story of my great-aunt

who / trapped in a marriage that made
her / gnaw at her own foot finally / said mama
I’m leaving him and her mother said no sweet
child / of mine is going to get divorced so / my
great-aunt got / into her car / cranked the
engine to life / found a way out without / ever
leaving the garage

the women in my family hide / escape
routes in their purses / next to their car / keys
sign their divorce papers / in blood / walk
into rivers their pockets heavy / with shame
taught me to always / check for the nearest
exit and know

when / to go whether with a suit / case
packed and one foot / out the door or limp
on the kitchen / floor with my pretty
little head in / the oven