For the White Girl in Poetry Workshop Who Says I Don’t Belong Here
i cut out all the parts you wouldn’t like about this. decided to leave only:
the femur.
the fibula.
the thorax.
my neck, swiveling skull
a clicking vertebra, the spine
or the tail. what is left of it anyways.
my knees—still bleeding—fresh.
for you, my sweet.
the jaw grind. my ground teeth.
chatter. chatter. chit. chit.
i sleep with too many words in my mouth.
mouth, in
the catcher.
the dream—catcher—in my chest.
the left shoe. the wrong foot.
the note: read for further instructions.
a single tube of bitch. the lipstick, my dear.
my ruptured lung. the slinky.
i put a spell in this. for you, my dear.
a pastor. green. a pen like a pink tooth.
i wish you ink that bleeds.
a well. blxck & fat. a hungry thing.
the hand.
the Saturn.
the binary four.
the digitus medius.
for you, my sweet.
This selection comes from the book, HoodWitch, available from Acre Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Tierney Bailey.
From their website (https://www.faylitahicks.com)
: “Faylita Hicks (pronouns: she/her/they) is a queer writer and the Editor-in-Chief of the Austin-based literary journal Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada University, and has received fellowships and residencies from Lambda Literary, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Tin House, Right of Return USA, and the Vermont Studio Center. Hicks’s debut poetry collection HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019) is a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award and the Julie Suk Award. Her poems and essays have been featured in or are forthcoming in Adroit, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Huffpost, Longreads, Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, the Rumpus, Slate, Texas Monthly, Texas Observer, and elsewhere.” Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. Currently, Tierney is an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, a copyeditor at Strange Horizons, and a freelance graphic designer. Tierney earned a Masters Degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Tierney is most easily found screaming into the void on Twitter as @ergotierney.
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