Nocturne
The first to be cast out was my darkness.
My lover, too, knew this exile: Darkie flung
From the mouths of lighter peers to taunt
Or tar us. They called me Blackie. He was
Called African-booty-scratcher. We both
Were skid-marks, ink-spots, or coal-black.
You should know I would have my lover
No other way. I have no poems in which
I have fucked white men because I do not
Fuck white men. Reader, we still exist. Yes,
I do wish a Black horde would kiss me, will
Find me kissable. Even here, in this sloe
Garment of coal-cauled skin, is a room I’d
Offer them at nightfall, a low-lit speakeasy.
It has been said the tongue is the whip
Of the body.[1] It lashes like a cat-o-nine-
Tails. In the quarrelsome dark, I flicker
My forked tongue across his neck’s ridge
& his veins’ verdigris pulsates like lamp-
Light: the bright, blooming rue of them
At my lips again. Isn’t this what their sea
God spoke over the aqueous-dark before
Before? The lambent elixir of Let there
Be flashing from between the black pitch
Of our hips. We are that bright & ancient,
Backlit by the streetlight’s honeydew. Come
Taste & see, he offers. And I lick the light
From his shaft. Within me, lightning. Yes,
I say, it is good. It is so, so good.
[1] The phrase “The tongue is the whip of the body” is a Lucumí proverb.
“Stars (Live at Casino Montreux)”: Nina Simone: 1976
She lied supine, spotting hunter’s moon through pine branches when
Day stilled in a place one could still see the moon at day. The sun, ears-
Of-wheat-gold now, was not yet taken down.
Impastoed against what
Might’ve been cobalt sky, sloshes of ginger and ash met as she thought
How tragic the sky’s competing forms were—and, like harmony, how
Oddly congruous. Starless, otherwise—
*
Star-crossed, star-stitched. Teeth, baby, she’d say. Then the television
Screen flickering its usual XXX of stars. I get lost in the stars. My mind’s
Night that way. I do as told, tenderly, as if memory were muscle. Isn’t it?
She lurches forward. I feel her breath’s menthol cool against the shell
Of my ear. Bay-mouthed now, I rake and I rake and I rake until
I’ve divined from between her legs a white lake.
*
O Star
Bright vandal If you be compass
At all Lead me back to the dark Treasury of her chest