Her temple smeared across my walls,
I bowed beneath her stream.
Two arcs of piss & bloody vomit
shot inside the MRI machine.
The half-moon rolled back and she
emerged beneath me. My: too much
brown, too much blush, too many
lashes to heal, rattled loose in a split
mouth like crack rocks. She spewed
a bloody history: my people, her father,
some agony at the West Midlands Area
Conservative Society. When she groaned
Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack,
I tempered the pain—oxycodone
for one, high grade the other, ditched
my beeper in her cradle. Switched scrubs
for straps & animal skins in the back seat
of an Audi TT. I saged my hair with a blunt.
Danced away her ruin beneath a black
girl’s melody.
Copyright © Seema Yasmin. This poem originally appeared in Breakwater Review, issue 20. Used with permission of the poet.