woke up this morning with
malt liquor questions
and a burning gut.
my bed is empty and cooling
the sheets stink;
all i remember are creamy thighs
and bloodshot eyes moving away.
snatches of an old blues song
float from the bathroom to the kitchen;
i slip back into darkness
where she's the snakewoman
humming,
feeding me the flesh of my enemies.
the moon fractures against her skin,
her sharp tongue is red and sweet,
scratches the roof of my mouth.
woke back up,
to her, humming,
sitting beside me.
dipping her finger into a bowl
then into my mouth
red and sticky.
singing,
singing away my hangover,
singing.
This is brilliant. I like how it feels like we woke up with you because it puts the reader right in the room with that first line. There is this sense of emptiness and desperation, and then the creamy thighs and old blues song bring a sense of softness, home and comfort, as does the image of her moving, almost gliding, from room to room, and then we move to the image of the snake and feel her sensual bite at the end. Seriously good stuff.
This book represents a thirty-day period of my poetry journal. Each poem addresses
the dominant thoughts occupying my mind during the early morning hours of a given
day.
Still Living on my Feet is the follow up to Tichaona Chinyelu’s first book, In the Whirlwind, which was rooted in a sense of hard-hitting revolutionary black love. However, in this sophomore effort, Tichaona brings the revolutionary essence from deep
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