Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by E. Hughes
Bulldaggers Between Starshine and Clay
I want to fashion my black mouth to speak this
journey of our bodies into utterance: What
does one call this road between us? Once, a man
called this road love. Today, I call this path
a sequence of music—the burgeoning of speech,
poems we leave in a puddle at the center
of our bed, the place where we touch each other
until all we are is sound and heat. This must be why
god called that moment of separation the beginning—
the pain of being torn into something new.
You rip me where it’s funny and hurts the most.
Somewhere between my legs is the most shameful
part of my memory, the black portal of my need—my god
who is this sweet child you have summoned from me?
Ekphrasis of Black Women Fucking Each Other
I will not call her mother— though she’s heard
the first moan, though her name is
the most primal thing
will I say besides Jesus, besides Mercy—
I am learning the land of her, tasting
the salt and citrus of her privacy. I do not need
to know her with my eyes—the darkness
we have entered is the only place
I have ever felt undead.
There is no moon or stars. No light
guiding us through this subtle night
toward life outside of this
injured running. Do I call this care—
taking her into my mouth? I walk
into the captivity of her body
for shelter, a room where one woman enters
the other’s wound holding her there until,
for once—
a stanza of desire.
Love’s Rare Sightings
The burden of my life bound my mother
to a man. I don’t want to bind my lover
who wants to hold me like a deer cradled
in the secrets of green bush to this opening—
my mother holding the pregnancy test
could not make the merciful decision—crush
my life before I could feel or be killed
by the weight of being unwanted.
In the threat of night, a woman holds me
now and wants to enter through the opening.
She asks Where do you want me to touch
you? I want to cover myself in the green
blanket of her passion, let her pack the wound
with the darkest flesh of her body. She looks
at me as if I am someone worthy of love’s rare
sightings, love’s green ambition—although
not even my mother considered me worthy
of love’s precision of naming. My father’s
mother decided the sound shape of my newborn
frame. My mother laughed at its staggered music.
The initials E.T.—an alien. My lover calls
what we make in passion a bird black with flight—
although I am creek run dry, the emptied
body of desperate child, a greening corpse.
If I weren’t already dead, I’d try to love her back.
***
Author photo courtesy of author