when I hear those whispers moon out your crescent mouth dressed in criminally innocent smiles cracked open so culprit laugher like crooked stars snapping their points off for the pawn shop re-up I re-so fall in love with you again everyday melt beside your free-so tongues so side-effect wild abandoned train track grass gorgeous dry aqueduct perfect the way metal has learned to rust in order to make it back to nature I wonder too if you can see me rusting tryna make it home to the nature in you talk-to-me-nice you say under suck-tooth missives shucked from night-shells so under the beak I’m learning es lo mismo so que— wince pleasure sweetest pain first sips from fridge-cold mezcal pero la vina es so simplemente major or so I’ve heard when we met I brought flowers I picked from in between the city’s missings lilies and wild tulips with haikus cute shit written about the way I wanted to so and so sweet with you and you cause I thought I was a bad nigga and I wanted you to too but you brought a bouquet of stolen thunder from some hush-now-babied lightning storm cause only you the most oouu’est baddy te so amo-sote know how to talk a cloud into giving away
Love Poem
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- August 5, 2022
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© Basie Allen, from Palm-Lined with Potience (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022).
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
New York, New York
Palm-Lined with Potience is New York City poet and visual artist Basie Allen's debut collection of poems. Basie's work is by turns political and lyrical, charting both physical and emotional landscapes, making maps of paintings and paintings of maps. While rooted in Pro-Black theory, art, and precise description, Basie makes space in the ekphrastic for the eerie and abstract. The poems in this collection search for nodes of truth in a tumultuous sea of fractured facts.
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