1 poem
A Foreword for my American Patois
I am spread eagle before cops
and grown men, before cashiers
and passerby who pry into the white
space between my thighs, shoving cold
hands up my skirt for a title to cling tight to.
But the words for me and my history
are too much and too little, too sporadic
in their earthquake waltz to be bound.
I tucked it deep into bottle cap bodies
of text I pop the top of, using two Black
fingers and smooth lines from granddaddy.
The text speaks only to my stroke,
stripping down to barebone words
and lucid dreams. Inside, I spot my home city
who preys on blue roses, crushing flower boys
and clipping my wings from a cage.
I am a rooster bound for slaughter, locked
in a chained fence room I bust out of, the iron
alloy crushed beneath teen spirit. I sprint past
the synonyms Disney and plantation;
Zora Neale Hurston and the cherry blossom
sunrise; bright light and a black future –
but the Orlando PD parked at the top
of the seventh stanza, their cop car shuttling
siren sounds into the heart shaped box
my text and I live in. When they prod my dark meat,
I buck and scream while they gouge out my breasts,
the blood-filled ventricles oozing
sweet ink in Rorschach shapes. Some see blood, sugarcane,
and other things discarded after use. I see America, but with
my skin hue the new fad. The soot blots dribbled by my wounds
are combed into words weeping the tongue of verse:
nappy-headed, slave-funk, sexy, sharecropper, ship-
wrecked, Mississippi, buoyant, trauma, triumph
the lexicon lifeblood breeds contradiction
and conflict into verse. The Buddhists call it a Kōan;
I call the moans and morphemes a poem.
Malcolm A. Robinson is an English student at FSU. They previously attended Georgia Southern University and hold an A.A. in creative writing. They live in Orlando, FL.