to my body.
My body is not
sure if it accepts.
or I am a river with
a dam at its neck
that has begun
to drown its own fish.
or I am a field setting itself on fire
just to become the sun.
or I am a newborn so obsessed
with the birth,
I throttle my own throat
and hope for a repeat.
or I am a ball of melted wax
burying my own wick.
or I am the flame
melting my body
down into a hard mess.
or My eyes have learned not to believe themselves.
or My eyes have learned the sky will be
a red sea of winged teeth if you believe it to be so.
or I am trapped behind eyes
that recognize the demon in everything.
or There is a demon in everything;
I know this.
or My brain is my own cracked windshield,
my own bug-splattered glass mirror
and I am driving towards the sunrise.
or I am still driving
towards the sunrise.
SILK
On this night, my body
unwound like a spool.
I was beneath a boy
who loved thread for all the things
he could make of it.
Tonight, I am smooth and pliable
like good silk before a snag.
I am a metaphor for anything
beautiful and ruin-able when it
hooks on to sharp things.
He lays his full weight
on my torso and I am a leaf
pressed still onto the mattress,
pressed small and flat by something living
for the purpose of study.
I am not sad about this.
It’s here that I can feel all my edges,
visualize my outline best
against a hungry white backdrop.
I am not sad about this.
I am dry despite the spit
and I am dry despite the fire hydrant
opening along the sidewalk of my spine,
giving my dancing vertebrae reprieve
in such repressive heat.
Beneath the grunting face
of the simplest kind of sex,
when two people want things
that are not each other, so settle
for a drive-thru buffet of each other’s lips—
It’s okay. I am dry and sort of shiny
but dull on the other side
like good silk.
I don’t really remember the snagging
but at some point he stops
and looks down at our axis
to find blood.
I gave him a fake name
when we met, so I feel like
maybe the red is someone else’s
admission of guilt, a red slap
on my ass that melted into shame,
a kiss so hard and hungry
it poured its color onto the sheets
or maybe the fire hydrant’s water
ran out of blue and started
spraying out its own red self
from my opening that pretended
itself an altar, though it is not.
There’s blood, he said
and I am suddenly shooting with pain.
I have been so careful with my dry,
I forgot that water is needed here
so my body offers blood.
He finishes, and there are loose runs
all over my pillowcase,
a trail of pulled silk and ruin.
IN WHICH THE GIRL BECOMES A YOUTUBE CLIP
Whenever these things
happen, my bones turn
so white, it’s nearly
blinding. All that
white fire wrapped
in all my black
skin.
&
It’s just a dance
because it’s just
my body like it’s
just a tree despite
the rope but my
graveyard looks
so different from theirs.
&
I watch my professor
stumble right over my
own body cuz I’m so
black and I’m so girl
that it’s like I popped
right onto the screen
and stayed there.
&
I know it’s my whole
body in that white boy’s
mouth when he says
It’s so interesting cuz
when all the lights were off
the video started playing
the screen lit my face
and all I felt were teeth.
AFTER ST. LOUIS, GOD
octavia butler reminded us that ‘god is change.’ st. louis is a city overflowing
with god. — Adrienne Maree Brown
St. Louis is a city
overflowing with
God. St. Louis is a
with hands. St.
Louis is a fist of
a city. God is an
open hand
overflowing. A
hand is a small
city. God is a
city overflowing
with fists.
St. Louis is God
with or without
the open hands,
with or without
the fists.
A city is a fist
overflowing with
God. God is St.
Louis becoming.
God is a city
overflowing with
St. Louis & St.
Louis & St. Louis.
Our hands are all
overflowing with
fists in the shape
of St. Louis. St.
Louis is a city of
after-God. After
God, each fist is
its own city.
Each city
overflows with
or without God.
After God, St.
Louis is a fistful
of open hands.
God is a city
building fists to
protect the hands.
Every city is
overflowing with
fistfuls of St.
Louis. Our hands
are overflowing
with Gods in the
shape of a city.
A city of fists is
still open hands
but is overflowing
with after-God.
God is a fist
overflowing
with St. Louis.
The after-God
overflows in all
our fists. After
St. Louis, every
city is a fist
overflowing.
& after St. Louis, God.
UNBUTTONED & UNBOTHERED: ON IMAGINING THAT FREEDOM PROBABLY FEELS LIKE GETTING THE ITIS
Look at our bellies,
peeling open in hunger,
& tweets about free
dom like it’s a candlelight
dinner, or a thick outdoor
barbecue with butter &
lawn chairs & scraped knees.
Look at our anxious lips,
the sore hinges of our jaws
clamped around every piece of text,
tonguing each quote in search
of some greens & pig feet.
How the growl in our gut
carries itself across the country,
desperate to feed on fre e
ddd om like it’s full
of black folks, swollen round
with joy & a mouthful of ornaments.
&nb
sp; A table full of the kitchen’s blessings,
whole bowls of free ee eee eeee
steaming under our nose,
drunk with centuries of starving,
now finally feeding on f
reeeeeeeeeeeee d
om like it’s black folks’
bellies stuffed with ENOUGH,
whole bodies celebrating the itis,
got our bones dressed in satisfied.
Our ghost uncles & great-great
grand aunts finally draped across
everyone’s living room armchair,
unbuttoned & unbothered,
got an armful of finally fr fffr ffffreee
filling America’s ravenous gut,
putting all the bloodied fields / fists,
all the dripping trees / heels & bridges,
all of them, all those ghosts and
all their glory, all that blood and
all those bodies, finally to sleep.
That’s some kind of free.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the journals where versions of these poems first appeared:
Connotation Press: “Questions for the Woman I Was Last Night, 1” and “Questions for the Woman I Was Last Night, 3”
Drunk in a Midnight Choir: “Sankofa”
Muzzle Magazine: “Conjuring: A Lesson in Words and Ghosts” and “How America Loves Chicago’s Ghosts More Than the People Still Living in the City”
The Offing: “Blood”
Word Riot: “Quentin Tarantino or Why I Do Not Trust You with My History or On Wearing a Gaudy Robe While Grabbing the Ass of a Naked Black Woman for a Magazine”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jacqui Germain is a freelance writer, essayist, Callaloo Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominated poet living in St. Louis, Missouri. Her writing focuses on historical and contemporary iterations of black, brown and indigenous resistance, which she believes is deeply urgent work that both exists on the page and extends beyond it. Jacqui has represented Washington University in St. Louis on the national poetry stage on five separate occasions and was the 2014 Katherine Dunham Fellow with the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Word Riot, The Offing, and Muzzle Magazine, in addition to Sundress Publications’ 2015 Best of the Net Anthology.
OTHER BOOKS BY BUTTON POETRY
Aziza Barnes, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun.
J. Scott Brownlee, Highway or Belief
Sam Sax, A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters
Nate Marshall, Blood Percussion
Mahogany L. Browne, smudge
Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days
Sierra DeMulder, We Slept Here
Danez Smith, Black Movie
Cameron Awkward-Rich, Transit