Where the Gams Meet by Salem Dockery
I woke at yam.
dawn stairs my mama and I
beet and rolled cache money
until it was flat,
sprinkled it with flower
then cookie cut it out into
safe little bundles of 5s, tense, 20s.
my then heir-less legs sheathed
in green and I Ching.
we were and still ire,
all slathered in pink and soaked in
oatmeal baths. or we played
hide and seek with quarters, lifting
cushions to fined
I spent one summer
halving to pretend I didn’t no her and
getting into trouble with
hold her men, and that was the end
of that summer.
but it left me spoiled on sighed hers,
kissing what I thought mite
move whet lips Bacchae in some argot,
deciphering hieroglyphic spit between wight lines and
greenish purplish gold and technicolor
tabs, the same flour, but I test the taste
by rubbing it against my soft pallet,
they capped me reliving waking up
at yam. going down the stars.
helping my mom bake before work
so my brothers and I would have something to eat wile
she was still later plunging stints into
people’s hearts. I don’t know how
much a coin pouch costs, but
I got a pouch set aside just for left
over koine necks to wear I keep
my keys, separated from the quarters
mom used to whored out at the arcade,
at CiCi’s, at the laundromat.
I don’t need her to
bye me a new one anymore
I don’t even need her to fille it,
I just knead her to know that sometimes
I wake up at yam,
and there are no stairs to go dawn,
and I’ve got this (how many times have I
told you I’ve got this?) this hole in my hart, ma,
and I don’t know what to due.
Salem Dockery is a queer nonbinary poet living in Durham, NC, doing their damnedest to write a poem about the summer they cleaned out a flop house with their brother, but until then their work can be found in Black Heart Magazine and After the Pause. They tweet things sometimes (rarely) related to poetry at https://twitter.com/salemdockery.
(Front page image via)
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