Two poems by Brittany Adames
When you wake up on sun-soothed weekends,
you saturate in a pot of boiling water —
watch it drip in pools on the small of your back.
On the weekdays, you find a
melody to the uneven asphalt
on your way to work.
You refrain from choosing haphazard bangs
and wear language as if it were skin.
You leap over the hoops on the playground
as if they were cracked in lava lapping
around your ankles and when the boy
rakes his metal-caked nails through
your disheveled braid,
you swallow him until
he is another bone in your body.
And then, winding your pinky
around the small handle of the mug
& feeling your mother’s butterscotch-wrapper
words melt on your tongue,
you think in children’s rhymes.
And depression is only three syllables
from kissing your temple but
you gnash your milked teeth
and make flesh out of a yellowed slip.
the chin cupped by the kiss itself / i can see it all / i'm staring straight into god's face / smile a scalloped
edge / my mother sizes me up / says i am fat but in english it translates to / i love you / this is a greeting
/ more known to the invisibilized self / than the body bending the river / i cry when i eat / i die when i
eat / the plum has begun to thaw / spittle running down its skin as if to say / this is your g[l]ut / who
else knows to turn the body / into a recitation / if not the toilet? / it's really sad, isn't it / how i'll die in
here / how the soul scrambles up your throat / just to be swallowed back down again
