notes on domesticity
there are no spoons left too much tasting & stirring the eggs
are cooked just so & speckled white with goat cheese but’ve gone
cold, of course as always but the toast is warm & unburnt
fake butter buttered smeared with jammy fruit a poet
has made a film & she is on a screen before an audience
rocking medium length locs a black suit & heels beautiful
in spite of the lighting which feels off casts a jaundiced
glow against her red-brown tone she speaks of hometowns
from Tennessee to Mississippi churches with photos gone
sepia & grainy with time of time, what are we? but
an accumulation of snapshots a bit of eggshell reddish
brown like her skin & the yolks, an almost fluorescent yellow
like the light against her skin & blotches of gray mold
blooming from the wheatish brown bread tossed to compost
& bread & bread always so so much its sour dough
does not disappoint like the proclamations of doctors (always
white) who say i’m overweight but undressed before
the dusty mirror i am just right & sometimes just light
in the eye of a camera shuttering & developing i am
both shuttered & underdeveloped or, overexposed beneath
the harsh flash i am pale bashful skin of soaked walnuts
but still brown just not enough for my aesthetic
privileged drivel ain’t it? to paint it any other way to say
the way my eye sees beauty the cherry-picked choices
the forwardness of fruit & flirt she, with raven locs, speaks
of salt & dirt & rituals of southern taste what is wasted
on aesthetic besides hunger? i never ate the intestines
of a pig my auntie cleaned barehanded in her good
wig entire house perfumed with the funk of hog guts
me punked toward puke bougie rebuke my preference
for another kind of funk one that haunts my hands & sheets
long after the fun is done another kind of domesticity
how my palm seeks shelter between thigh shadow &
the miracle of her damp heat indelible almost edible
a broken yolk leaking like sun thru slatted blinds our
scattered limbs bleached in this wash of light our
exposure at once northern & southern: pyramid of nag champa
slow burning on the lid of a pickle jar
