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  • ‘Molassie
  • Arielle M. John (bio)

The master’s tools: a bucket of tar, ruin of diesel on the midnight’s back, sin-like stain on the done tainted flesh, a pair of horns jabbing at the low-lying night, spying them thorns in the side of the law. A dark leaping threat almost saved human by white sclera and snarling teeth, a hiss, a bark, a growl, a catch of threatening tongue writhing its way in the wide mouth wicked. Shrill double-blow on the greasy whistle that slices the sleep away from the ungodly hour, sanctifying the street’s pitch, the air a stagnant vapor of spirits, a putrid vamp of rum that soaks the sidewalks too, a coveted sniff to drug you a bazodee thing carried on a song, floating you through Empire Blvd with the morning running late to the dance and we do not mind. When it does come we are wild with wake, smoking of soot, charred sugar cane, limbs gone blacker with riot, angered embers crackling the agony of opening the day in this fault of skin. Watch the police a ready battalion, lynch mob parading blue costume, the metal barricade on the roadside a convenient cell, a quarantine for our sweat-dripping brown, all in reclaim of nigga and thug and shades of evil we get painted, whenever the day breaks like a mother, mourning at the feet of Brooklyn’s merciless spit-shined boots. [End Page 645]

Arielle M. John

ARIELLE M. JOHN, a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop Fellow (Oxford University), is the Artistic Director of The 2 Cents Movement, the largest poetry-based youth development nonprofit in Trinidad and Tobago. She is author of the chapbook entitled Songs in a Strange Land. She will soon begin graduate studies in performance and culture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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