by Samantha Thornhill
I. ABRINI GREEN
For what do the most indelible women wish—
Mothers with four arms, five children, no hand,
No pimp, sugar daddy, husband, or man—
Just eyes, lodged in the sides of their faces like fish?
This is where brown leather dreams swish
Through tattered nets. The stars done ran
Two blocks down Division Street. A caravan
Of dust and light, they left their winking niche
In Cabrini night, this brackish plot of sky.
A mama’s boy with hell’s tongue holds a gun
Loaded inside his head. He follows the stars
And watches his future bleach and gentrify.
Past linen and leather on blocks bone-white he runs
Wrapped in cry, back to a night of no Mars.
II. CHARLIE RED
What binds him to this life are the things he knows:
The jaundiced moon and starless asphalt nights,
The clouds crocheted by the cosmos and thrown
Across the fickle continuum of city lights.
The minutiae of these city blocks, he understands:
This treeless jungle of brick and present tense,
His beloved, blue and full with grip in hand,
Folk trickling like tears from tenements.
Their homes, kingdoms built on water, hold
Their rage of broken pipes and questioned bones.
With his chest of cantaloupe and tongue of gold,
He waits for Leda Mae to switch on home—
A museum of blood and bone, yet sexier
Than the silhouette of South America.
III. LEDA MAE BLACK
It’s Leda Mae before the fractured glass-
Museum of blood and bone encased in shard.
The frame is a mystery all its own; it’s brass
And keeps the self intact. A sweet reward,
Miss Leda Black, a concrete pirate’s bliss.
She’s free to the man she loves best
With his crescent smile and gibbous kiss,
Mosaic man with cantaloupe chest,
A head of fire, heart of seedless song,
With a red-shoed masterpiece on his arm—
Sweet and sinewy, his most decadent wrong.
To cool-eyed Lea, this comes as no alarm.
A tempest stews, churning in Leda Mae.
The knot in her throat will unravel, one day.
IV. STEPHONIA
Watch the virgin singer on stage croon Nina,
Husband of her, you man of erotic milk—
Guilt wags its hips and boomerangs back
To graze my rouged cheek. Your breath, like silk,
Slips across my breast and settles there. Black
Iago of love, listen here! We insist
The sky’s in our hands, not in demon dishwater.
Devil! You wrap hell’s tongue ‘round my wrist,
You, champion of my moral slaughter;
Kiss me with the symmetry of a scream
And love me with the danger of uncapped pens.
Sing to me guitar, in orgasm riffs.
I dream
You a task, judgemental friend, don’t care how, or when:
Then listen to Stephonia, in red shoes, become her.
After Gwendolyn Brooks
Poem copyright 2024 by Samantha Thornhill. All rights reserved.
See two more poems from Samantha Thornhill debuted on The Fight & The Fiddle: “Midases,” and “How to Use African Black Soap.”
Read more in this issue: Interview | Critical Essay | Writing Prompt