Parneshia Jones

All the children my sister has left kneeling in a garden. It is an orange spider crushed between their teeth, becoming heirs to each other’s hungers. We know better than to have daughters now. Today is not a crown it is a forceps, the sunken flower of my sister's waist. Today it only took a minute to discover who among us was cruel. Before her morning salatr, my sister digs her feet in a lake. By winter, blue throated robins will have gathered. Today is one place to bury a child and what you say after.

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment League Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair, The pink paint on the innocence of fear; Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall. Cutting with knives served by their softest care, Served by their love, so barbarously fair.

Dawn oversees percolating coffee and the new wreckage of the world. I stand before my routine reflection, button up my sanity, brush weary strands of hair with pomade and seal cracked lips of distrust with cocoa butter and matte rouge. I ready myself once again for morning and mortify. Stacking poetry and bills in a knapsack; I bundle up hope (it’s brutal out there). For a moment, I stand with ghosts and the framed ancestors surrounding me.