Monday, October 2, 2017

summa cum laude (Poem by Clara B. Jones)

summa cum laude

Your therapist said she wanted you dead, but mother rarely treated you badly. She made a lot of mistakes like neurons misfiring or father getting lost in the forest. Lobelia grew out of oak trees, and howler monkeys walked across a land bridge while jaguars bred in dry season watching toucans feeding insects to their young. You are a woman with army ants crawling in your hair. You are a woman who rode to Cañas on a bus with 5 campesinos and a lizard salesman traveling to Santa Rosa before father baked paca and rice for mother who bought tortillas at the cantina, circuits alive and hot as tarmac in Summer—black and viscous as lake silt. Father hid in mother's closet—her silks touching his cheeks, her scent seductive like Inga flowers—xanthous as her skin at dawn when gray sunlight reminded him of the last time he felt joy.

You build fembots.
Life is unfair and unstable.
Coloreds speak Danish.


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