you get it
people are always getting themselves
ruined & my god especially the girls
keeled over on spring mattresses, pressed
from behind, guts distended with stars
but you despise waste: a diamond earring lost
to the ocean equals exactly one exquisite head,
her mouth plastered shut with the soil’s glitter
damn girl it’s all good
you’ve worn the difference between death & dying
thrown death’s pelt dyed cocaine white over your shoulders
you’ve seen a man dissolved by cancer
are you not supposed to mourn
everything
starve your guts to pay debts or drink Detroit tap
someone has to enjoy God when he arrives
see him a stripped vulva shined with SPF 30
see him foaming, swirled in your lover’s mouth
see him sun-kissed thighs & brined fingertips
see him stitched through the ears, sunken treasure
Kim Anoints his feet with oil, her hair
Stripped to bare feet
oil caps her hips
lips rich in protein
& Hennessy (he won’t
drink anything lighter
than him/she swallows
nothing darker)
sigmoid spine
redacted black pubes
why should you be
a veiled woman
because men are
cameras & your
skin is a mirror
imagination surrenders
& what do we expect
to dream of you
stigmata where there
should be navel or
nipples heavy with
mother’s milk
understand this: a
woman is a narrow
well & man groans to
fill her then man
voids himself/woman
devours his gaze
Yeezus' wife (III)
When black women starve
she eats the fat of my ass dips
her cornbread in the oil pressed
from my pores my table stay set
for famine well-nourished in body
my nipples point north to a vigilant
God from which the manna rains
she asks why are some women born
last & so far from God I say my trues
come dream L.A. wasn’t built in a day
but on a waxed million dollar vagina
mouths claim they never had a _____ girl
like me & I let my glitter splatter their beards
white girls say when I go blonde I’m like
a whole other ethnicity so exotic like
some pets & dancers I forget that black
women have happened to me & men
& sex have happened to them but
she says more more of that my skin
the New Black my venus a Persian rug
on collection dreams gestate & die
between my lips center of the universe
toll the bell who wants to dine first?
Jameka Williams is a poet and graduate of Eastern University in Philadelphia, Pa. Her work has appeared in Eastern’s The Inklings, Rowan University’s Glassworks Magazine, Prelude Magazine, Public Pool and is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins. She’s currently on staff at Winter Tangerine Review. When she’s not writing, she’s eating Oreos and archiving the ideas that haunt her over at jamekaangelie.tumblr.com. She resides in Chester, PA.