i know you would like that:
alien sand packed thick in my throat
or salt sucking the teeth out my mouth.
don’t matter, huh? you just want me undone,
any one of nature’s big legged rickshaw pullers
can get the glory of dragging my undersong through to silent finish.
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I’m building a nest to give birth to nothing in.
I’m ripping fur from my chest like rabbits do.
I’m down with down. I’m your dream girl but only if you stay up all night thinking about other stuff.
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I am half the me I was before you. Crease my skin and apply steady pressure. My flimsy lungs will tear because you don’t know which flaps to fold and I can only take so much wear.
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lotus-kneed, showered in gasoline.
People bowing to him, silent
but for his flesh
crackling.
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David Ishaya Osu, a Nigerian poet, is our poetry editor for February and March. His work has appeared in: Eureka Street, Atlas Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka, Birmingham Arts Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Grey Sparrow Journal, RædLeaf Poetry: The African Diaspora Folio, A Thousand Voices Rising: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, among others. David is … Continue reading
Feel my body like an unattended blackness
a portal a kept sake
not meant for keeping settle me remove
the pillows and rupture me
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I imagine this boy, the lotion on his hands, pressing
and releasing, and then the kiss—which opened up
every sense in the world. How he, too, could lean in
and start something small.
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He’s got eyes like wet cement. Sticking Junior is like finding your name in a graveyard.
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American sex goddess, innocent
as white bread with trimmed crusts.
That was who I agreed to be.
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The James Franco Review 