I Be Too Busy to Love Anything But a Drink

 

 

I’m used both the bottom of a bottle I drank alone

and body of someone I kinda loved.

 

what makes a wine bottle a body.

is what spills on the floor and onto my hands

 

I lick it up clean, nurse the bottle back to body back to empty again

and again, and again until

 

I am drunker than the last time

I drink to hold something that will leave when i want it to

 

I drink because that kind of control is important

and drunken me has lessons to learn

 

a bottle is a body but smaller and easier to carry around

I be too busy to love anything but a drink.

 

and I’m over the way love hangs its self inside my throat,

barricading my teeth to one another.

 

the idea of it does not make me smile,

more like it hurts to breathe.

 

when thinking about the last person to really love me

and the last person I really loved

 

I gag at how many times a four letter word stretches around my entire body

clinging to the soft parts of me.

 

I say no, I’ll keep saying no until the bottle lets me loose.

doesn’t make me sick

leaves my belly alone and

my hands alone

and my heart to be sitting still

along a muddy sad river

seeing myself in it and only myself in it

when love and drunk no longer mean the same thing to me

I’ll be able to hold a sleepy lover in my hands,

hold their big heavy heart,

sway together in bath water and silence like the memory does

maybe one day I’ll look for myself in heartbeat

that isn’t a song

maybe I’ll be that person’s person

maybe one day I’ll give in.

but i won’t hold my breath for it.

because then I’ll miss my train to work.

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How to Pray

Ask me what a perfect moment looks like

and ill say despite the carnage around us “you’re doing great”

and it will be a good morning.

because

when the air recognizes its worth

and changes

we change too

we wear thicker jackets and

the train feels warmer

and there’s a swollen quiet

There is a man reading passages

from the bible

and this is a sort of perfect filling thing

a kind crushing of sin

a breaking of bread each morning

where time is the wind that

kisses the bibled man’s face.

So, if you ask me what perfect is, I’ll say

Perhaps Philly is just a moment of a perfect place

cause, Its skyline forgive the wildest

day and your baddest behavior

cause, each train car is a stained pew of rusted silver

where you say prayers

next to a black woman

holding time in her curlers

bending the trains speed around

each beauty supply treasure.

and With all this thick beauty

it’s difficult to get off

at the right stop

because time is up to me

and i want to ride here for what is forever,

I don’t mind the stench of

its stained floor

or the ricochet of the pew

against train tracks.

because here I am not asked

what a perfect anything is,

here, I don’t have to know

anything, except how to pray.

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Customer Service Jobs Ain’t Shit.

 

I almost always smile instead of beating the teeth from a racists mouth.

Instead of clawing away at the cacti stuck on my inner lips

I rotate slow.

Show them the back of my head

my eyes gloss over

blood drips from behind my ears and fingertips

I become a black bleeding museum.

 

White people live for this kind of taxidermy

A stuffed black body

presumed empty

dead,

fixed up with a smile

in public,

with their friends and family

in front of the children.

 

It’s astounding how white people bend themselves into a black person’s body.

How one question is a raging hunger and suddenly predator catching prey.

 

Nothing I do is an actual truth

so I just smile heavy, bleeding.

While white people feast and feast and feast

swallow my teeth hole,

smile in accomplishment,

reach over the counter separating us

to pick up all the words that fell from my mouth,

feed it to their children

and they eat it up

and I still smile

heart

breaking.

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Shanel Edwards is a Black Queer Femme dancer, writer and photographer in the Philadelphia area. Their choreography, written, and photographed work has been featured in The Philly Pigeon’s multimedia productions ‘How to Take Space’ and ‘Vanishing Point’. They are a recent graduate of Temple University with a degree in African American Studies and Psychology. They are an alumni of D2D: Dare to Dance and assisted in organizing Prelude Urban Dance Competition 2016-17. Their movement style is rooted in Hip-Hop, modern/contemporary and free movement. Her lifestyle incorporated using radical softness and honesty as a way to uplift and support Black Queer Femmes.