Briefcase of Little Tortures
Do you remember my first one
I was the scalpel’s leather coat on the warmest
[day nobody cares about] after our careless season
I chose to cradle the afterbirth
from my own blood rather than worship
the glory of donating yours
I am gathering in my body a briefcase of little
tortures for you and hoping they are just that
each one a brief case
***
Our first time was like a first night in prison
The rapists and murderers waited to
get a whiff of the Eden in our wandering bones
You were that African girl brought in
to the captain of the slave ship in Roots
eyes cold like post-op Pecola Breedlove
skin cold like pre-op Pecola Breedlove
lying flat, palms like hands up / don’t shoot
If Pecola breed love, then I breed lust
and you bleed the bluest cry from the curse
and the seed awaits a whiff of Eve’s last fruit
she’d ever really taste
***
I can’t look at my four heart chambers
in the photograph anymore without
hearing the song of mirrors in their flesh
I swallow each note with a razor blade
Mama says, They’ll come to you when they ready
Ready is sealed in a black Samsonite briefcase
***
I write decaying organs now
Each one dies inside me before
Mama has time to plan the wake
A sharp pain here and there is another word
on the obituary mourning as the
vocabulary becomes more advanced
weeping above you and me
and all those nobodies we used to know
who will sit in the pews and
read this like a love song to death
It’s really my final attempt to
pack the briefcase you pray to leave behind
Separation
Mice gnawed their way through processed foods
in the cabinet’s top shelf—celebration or grief
I’m reminded of those wedding portraits or
wedding cake statues of mice as bride and groom
They don’t look happy—never smile—just stand
with whiskers and tails erect at the gallows of matrimony
Perhaps that’s why they attended this banquet
traipsing the wildflowers lining the cabinet shelves
exchanging handshakes with their tails
in confirmation or consolation
daily feasts to mourn that house’s return
to ashes—marriage’s return to dust
I swung at every mouse I could with a corn broom
without cheese or trap—just fury
swept their ineptitude away with mine
None would jump the broom this time
yet others kept coming
They all knew it was done
LEN LAWSON is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with poems appearing or forthcoming in Winter Tangerine Review, pluck!, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Berfrois, and many other anthologies and journals. He has received a fellowship from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Len is Poet-in-Residence for Sumter County (SC) Cultural Commission and co-founder of the Poets Respond to Race initiative. He teaches writing at Central Carolina Technical College.
ALEXANDRA BEGUEZ is an illustrator, cartoonist and mythographer based in New Jersey. She has a love for bright colors, science fiction, hoofed beasts, potatoes and cautionary tales. Her comics and illustrations appear in Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, Quarter Moon, Ink Brick and Carboncito. She has received an Honorable Mention from the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles Illustration West 53 and a 2014 MoCCA Arts Festival Award of Excellence, as well as having work featured in the Society of Illustrators 2015 Comic and Cartoon Annual. Recently, her work was chosen to be included on Latin American Ilustración 4’s online collection, The ARCHIVE. She is currently enrolled in the MFA Visual Narrative program at the School of Visual Arts.