They
I was a married woman,
silent as a stone in water
but not too old to dream of
the flaring of my womb,
the rigid of my jaw bone.
♒︎
How can I explain to you:
my skin, leather black with time,
sashayed through a room of daggers.
Hard to picture those sweet boys,
hard to see them take turns
willing to slaughter love for the company.
Mama, I could hardly breathe
and I never dreamed of love like that,
walking this earth after they
Lynne Thompson is the author of Start With a Small Guitar and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. In 2018, she was awarded Honorable Mention for Cave Canem’s Toi Derricote/Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize as well as the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize for her manuscript, Fretwork, which will be published in 2019.
