Pride or Ars Poetica or The Lions Have Eaten A Long-Suspected Poacher & Left His Head
It feels good to eat/ the devil/ is /a raw hide pulsing/ across my tongue/ sings a new sound/ her name is January/ came & with it/ three heads of our kinfolk/ severed & drying in the Serengeti dawn/ look, poacher, you’ve gutted my sister/ & this time no ocean is waiting/ for me to be shackled/carried out/ of reach/ look/ poacher, your torso is but a gourd/ out of which I will yield supper for each of my young/ poacher you are not/god/forgotten &/ here/ are these the claws about which you’ve penned mythology/ i breathe into the vast sky/ you bottle it/ to keep/ your women young/ I cry for my deadgone/ you sneak the tears into an iron flask/ you make a honeyed broth famous for its propensity/ to unwound/ poacher/ perhaps you are not yet your own wound/ Enjoy it /I will kill you & honor/ my mother who was slit/ open/ as your cheapest lover laughed/ into the hollow/ pried her jaws into warring valleys/ harvested/ her teeth/ one at a time falling into a leather pouch curdled with whiskey/ and silver dollar/ look poacher/ I won’t be coy/ here is my sharpest fang around your neck/ hangs what is left of my mother’s people/ taught me to give the truth my blood/ain’t for sale/ for you I will unhinge the whole red sky/ you welcome/ to rot here or we can ship you back to wherever you from/ you don’t get to live/long/enough to watch/ as my people die / cause my folk don’t die no more
Aurielle Marieis a Black, Queer, Atlanta born & bred poet, hip-hop scholar and activist. She was chosen by Safiya Sinclair as the winner of Blue Mesa Review’s 2017 Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems are featured in or forthcoming from the Adroit Journal, BOAAT, Scalawag, ESSENCE, Allure, and the Huffington Post. Her inaugural collection Gumbo Ya Ya won the 2017 Write Bloody Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Write Bloody Press. Although her work has lived on a global host of stages, her favorite will always be her grandmother’s kitchen. For booking info, updates on her work, and increasingly odd midnight rants on all the ‘isms’ follow her on twitter: @ElleOfTwoCities.