Find and share the perfect poems.
the first time you feed yourself
a hearty word like
beautiful
it will taste unconvincing and wrong.
salty,
fruitless rhetoric
still coats your palate.
eat.
until your belly is swollen.
until you are stuffed and confident.
eat
until you can't stomach
anything that doesn't feed you.
Copyright © 2018 by Roscoe Burnems. This poem originally appeared in Scene & Heard, January 2018. Used with permission of the author.
“white folks hear the blues come out, but they don’t know how it got there.” —ma rainey
a timeline of music
went from drum call to call for freedom
from plucking on banjos to bondage on a ship
from djembes to django
he brushes his gums bloody
trying to cleanse himself of his father's smile.
he's never seen it
but has heard it was there.