Alleyway
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As fresh garbage is. As dirt sucked out of a fingernail. As a wall,clean of prostitutes. What I am trying to say is, when I am this, I amat the mercy of my nakedness. A pillar of undress whose power I donot know how to wield. I watch porn. I study the geometry of limbssplayed. Not the moan but the angle of a moan. I swallow. In this way,I am a thief. Sometimes, I forget my body & go untouched until I amtouched & scream. Sometimes, I want to eat my breasts down to theirbitter rind & spit them out. I want to be the bitter rind, without suckand easily thrown. Easily thrown, I want to be the pebble, thumbed& wished upon before enveloping the lake I sink in. I sink in you,the lake, & by lake I mean gutter, a water that does not hold me well.Here, we are not the bodies our mothers made. If you are to hold me,hold me as a gun. With significance. Grip me & profit the dark, theunattended purse, that pair of heels darting from us in dull claps,sharpening against the concrete like teeth against a stone. [End Page 336]
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Sean Des Vignes, Aziza Barnes, and Aisha Phoenix
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Christina Barrett-Jones
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Aziza Barnes is a Los Angeles native brown woman poet living in Bedstuy, New York. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was published in 2013 by Button Poetry Press. Her work has also been published in Muzzle, NYU’s The Grey Area, West 10th Literary Journal, PLUCK! and Callaloo. The recipient of the 2013–2014 NYU Gallery Prize for Radical Presence in Black Contemporary Art for her poem “descendants,” Barnes attended the inaugural Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop in the United Kingdom this fall.
