dear Georgiana,
trying to do something to shake off this
post holiday boohoohoo.
as you know, i’ve been poking at baby sis again.
she looks like
strawberry shortcake, but watch the hardtack
underneath. it’ll
crack your teeth. it would be victory over
raging hearts
should we manage to become friends. but that’s
going to take more
vital stuff than i have to bleed. put that on hold.
besieged and collapsing under the weight
of my gift. love
as i live it seems more like Mercurochrome
than anything else
i can conjure up. it lo0oks so pretty and red,
and smells of a balmy
coolness when you uncap the little applicator.
but swab it on an
open sore and you nearly die under the stabbing
burn. recovery
leaves a vague tenderness and an India ink-red
splotch that’ll
vanish between one scrubbing or another
Mama’s favorite lipstick used to be a sultry
red violent
that segued into the hue of sangria when
applied to her
full rose-brown lips. i liked watching her
slick moves as
she studied her face over the dressing
table mirror, but
best was show she briskly slipped it
from her purse
while sitting in the car, cupping her compact
in one palm while
she uncapped the tube with a flick. One twist
of the brass
canister’s butt, and the stick rose for duty
the pangs-n-thangs of girlhood are foremost on my
agenda of items suppressed.
they form the Barrier Reef of my consciousness
like shipwrecked
swabbies, drunk with trauma, washed inland to
a grimmer death
against the shore where rent flesh, first red,
turns salt white
Wanda Coleman, “Letter to My Older Sister 5” from Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems. Copyright © 2020 by Wanda Coleman. Reprinted by permission of The Estate of Wanda Coleman, Black Sparrow / David R Godine, Publisher, Inc., godine.com.
Source: Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (Black Sparrow Press (Godine), 2020)
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