Her songs assail first light. Fluent, they flourish among the rooftops and chimneys, unsettle early morning sleep. Pausing among night’s tangle of sheets to
it smote me, and smoked me, and stoked me till the flames rose up inside me, and to tell it truthfully, that’s how I
Some boyfriend passed out in the bucket seat, mouth slack, my father’s breath drifting out of him. I smell my parents’ bedroom in the
“…my estrogen kitchen my black bag of desire” —Lucille Clifton, “Poem to My Uterus” I wanted to see you when they pulled you out,