magenta

The kind my homie Leah calls screaming

Vulva, a sparkler through gray

Hair with glint of mercury.

Quickly we become elders in this city

Smears our fingers like new murder.

They’re my mentor, with Sinti-Roma’s bleeding tarot.

When I was a kid they wrote Femme Shark Manifesto, I lived

A childhood with pink books and gem mischief.

That zine is the zine that I mean when I mean the zine.

It was a roll call for fem/mestyles,

Pumped a saline shot of sadness,

But at least there was fucking to look forward to.

I wanted to grow up and be them and then be their friend forever

Wash all their dishes

Eat drying pizza out the box

So I filled three bags and moved to Oakland.

It was blank verse for ten months and fucking

I slept on Anna’s couch,

As ever, and wrote for weed magazines.

Hot-handed roof gardens blush pink as lips.

The other ocean coughed out boys with limps and lisps,

Prince punctuated all my trysts

I dated a cop for about six months

A future flush with killer gear

He won’t tell you about the rapes but paints and sculpts

Them in his face

Where eyebrows once were and should appear.

Alas. This poem can’t reinstall the skin

Nor grow his eyebrows back again.

His fetid hide has ceased to be for all of  our eternities.

For this, only impotence.

A poem mauve with fizzy goiter,

Flaccid as Pacific sick spray spewed,

A poem to coil you in fistulae of  yarn and stars