brown sex
i think about fucking you,
our ancestors cracking
the earth open from under
and across oceans
to meet each other’s splitting
seams.
i think about our blood,
boiling when we touch,
our skin a cauldron for
the darkest magic — love,
i think — our brown glisten
pant and mattress dent.
we ride each other
like rising tides
on cherry shores.
i don’t think
you think like this.
i’m sure, to you,
i am just a lovely girl
with lovely poems
and an open door,
and, to you, that is
not a metaphor
for my legs, though
i want it to be.
i want your heart,
and i think i mean
to eat it. when i say
i imagine our blood boiling, i think i mean
i am a monster chef.
i think i mean i want you to fill me, so
won’t you kiss my hunger?
call me a pretty brown girl?
stroke my face as i stoke your fires.
i am sorry i want so much
from you.
i imagine we could
start a family, our ancestors
bless us with rain for our wedding.
this is how they forgive me
for your new hollow
because they know
this was as close as
i was ever gonna get
to loving a brown man
that isn’t already dead.
On the A Train
He steps on my toes,
and I wonder,
without looking up,
if my feet are in the wrong place
to be feet.
This is not a crowded train,
so it must be the square
I did not fit enough inside of.
It must be that, like a statue,
I was in his way.
I think I must think too much
to be any kind of thing
worthy of boundary,
of a look besides that
of wasted currency.
So it makes sense
that I am a woman,
a lesser thing,
and also black,
so just a thing
in its own putrid exactness,
so its own square,
and I must not fit enough inside
of this one either
if i am still alive
and not small enough
to fit under a boot
so maybe it is just me, a collection
of matter
mattering all wrong.
Taylor Steele is a Bronx-born, Brooklyn-based writer and performer. Her work can be found at such esteemed publications as Apogee Journal, HEArt Journal, Rogue Agent, Blackberry Magazine, and many forthcoming. Her chapbook Dirty.Mouth.Kiss is available on Pizza Pi Press. Taylor is a content writer for The Body is Not an Apology and Philadelphia Printworks, and she is an internationally ranked spoken word artist. She is a triple-Taurus who believes in the power of art to change, shape, and heal. taylorsteele.info
Maps For Teeth 