black magic

carried with her
a weapon: keys in hand,
disarming speech pattern;
accented and d r aw n out
drawl, a couple y’alls
and no reason to suspect
her about anything.

I never tell a lie,
she said
leading me to
some house.
i’m tepid but halfway up
the steps, not even
inquiring the sudden need to mention
but the practicality:
and how do you
get away with that?

I just never finish the story,
she said, half turned to the door
and I hung there in the frost air
hooked like an ornament
on the front porch:
slowly twirling, decorative to her
and glistening bright off her iris.

and not sure if I held any more meaning than that.

“How guys save me in their phone #12”

for some of us,
freedom was a legend;
a cage of smudged windows
a foiled pine for everything.
crippled twirl,
pace around the apartment
with a wand in hand,
repetitive crescendo in head,
tennis elbow from the instinctual
bend.

or the sudden broken glass
on the porch, the
knot of fervent caterpillars
sliding through my guts and
prematurely spilling
out onto the floor,
dissolving into pools of blood
like little girls ripped in pieces
in the midst of a tornado’s whirl
when they should have hid in the cellar,
waited patiently.

incubated until the day is finally warm
and facing them,
tear through the tether
unbridled in exodus, unimpeded
and ready to transform into grand ideas,
take off without interruption
like the little girl’s
nascent scorn;

now grown,
an envoy of acrimony
and the blue-black tones of
home, I pause here to ask myself
before I commit to the
flight,: what does metamorphosis
really feel like?
there is a visceral reply:
my skin
tearing at the thread of
each inside, each wound
and stretching wide
for me to see, wide
enough to case the sky
and black inside turned
outside; now
black each wing of
bone and vine,
black my eyes and
black the sea I shoot
from; everything I touch is black
like me,

and I can see for miles.

“transition (pt. 2)”

get some rest,
girl,
it’s the
Four of Swords.
they say I must be
heedless to dabble in the
dark like that
and unarmed.

more unthinking;
a fiery capricious
tantrum,
stabbed in the fucking back
and fingers naturally
pointy and
webbed as things
develop into theory,
into pentacles,
into air.
time is a sequence of
cracking joints, more
misfortune and now

I blend into the wall
when I want and you will
know me by
eyes popping open,
or my purr of a
low growl,
low to the ground,
undaunted in my
new soft black
steps.

you just hang there.

“Arachne”