Kemi Alabi

prayer in child’s pose

fuck your rose quartz! your incense-tune-forked vibes!
every god is a bloodsport crown
and light is no exception—
i’m sorry.
before this, i fell out of warrior pose
and cried for blunts, bacon, red velvet cake,
deleting your number, quitting my job,
buying a gun with one bullet (do they sell less
than classroom packs? should i learn more
before the race war?) and i thought all this
as my grieving thighs
hit the floor.
why not darkness?
some blessed ones rise and some of us sit,
witness. the priest hangs
from robes sewn by the village.
the poet, their twin, starves
naked and alone.
both fill books with all they know
of prayer.
prayer!
tribe, stewards of my stuck-shut soul:
so long as we’re Black, blue and alive,
Big Holy twerks beneath a falling sky.
can’t tell me darkness don’t shine.

Polyamory Defense #324

Master of No Chill dates the Superintendent of Chest Pain County
who’s married to a forest turned endless blaze
who’s fucking a planet eighty percent gilded ash—
that part’s a mess but the body’s more riddle
than liar. The body is just information. 
Breath nowhere breath vanished means 
I miss you, please touch me. Sometimes more 
I miss touch, sometimes more you please me. 
More please me. More you and you and you
are more than bomb shelters, let’s baba a village, 
warm our bodies back to real hearthed homes.
But where’s the love poem for me, my partner, 
their partner, our lovers and their rented doms? 
No hymns, no church. Shoulders our altars.
Like everything we need, impossible. 
Then imagined. Then desired.
Then made by trembling hands. 
Gods bless the houses this love builds.