Fragments

Under blue cotton bedsheets and clandestine curtains,
Beside dimly lit lamps and empty wine bottles,
There I lay, prisoner to your lint-laced promises
and well-stitched

ego.

We only meet when the sky is an abysmal black,
When our ebony bodies are inter like stubborn forks
locked in dark drawers.
I lay stiff and awkward and listen when you speak
a familiar tongue of Atlantic Ocean and
tribal
drums.

Two fingers like silk guns shoot
and
miss their uncharted target.

So you laugh and whisper
Finders Keepers.
You bite your lip and I bite a tumescent tongue.
I did not know whose blood I was
tasting.

I lie underneath you, inches above my esteem,
plummeted
And pressed against your wooden box-sized bed.
I’ve etched a new sky for myself in this four-cornered space,
It’s a distorted portrait of your
face.

I stare at your too-fast clock.
Counting
backwards the seconds
I have left before you slip between
the uneven spaces of my chubby fingers and heavy
thighs.

You swim happily in sacred lake,
As treasured trespasser.
I latch to lint, to promises, to you,
Though your limited love is fleeting.

You feed me assurance in painful increments.
Beautiful for a black girl. Pretty for a fat girl.
And the sweetest one you’ve ever met.
I wonder
Is that your excuse for not loving the whole of me?