2
" Mathematicians still don’t understand
the ball our hands made, or how
your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.
It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the window
to leave six ounces of orange juice
and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming
the sand you dug your toes in,
on the beach, when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes
of strangers, and your breath broke in waves
over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out
over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn:
Your eyes remind me of a brick wall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I’m that driver. All night
I’ve swallowed you in the bar.
Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed
eyelid along your inner arm, dried
raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered
all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d know
where to run when the cops came.
Your body is the country I’ll never return to.
The man in charge of what crosses my mind
will lose fingernails, for not turning you
away at the border. But at this moment
when sweat tingles from me, and
blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,
I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body
with smoke, and the lies came
like a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidents
they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding. "
― Jeffrey McDaniel
15
" Smoke hung heavy in the air. Will’s eyes stung. His throat.
His nose. And the crackling. God, the crackling fire was like the devil laughing.
Vera was in that house.
Mikey gripped his arm. “Hold on, Will—”
Will lunged forward. “Vera—”
“Whoa, Will.” Mikey’s grip tightened. “Stop.”
“The hell I will. Vera—”
“Billy?” One of the cops approached him. Said a bunch of
words. Helped Mikey hold Will back.
Vera was in that house.
Vera, her trusty wooden body, her frets, her new strings. Vera,
who’d had his back everywhere from Pickleberry Springs to
Nashville to New York to LA, from seedy bars to stadiums.
Vera, who’d helped him write his first song. His last song.
Every song in between. "
― Jamie Farrell , Matched (Misfit Brides, #2)
19
" Bennie's corner of Brooklyn looked different every time Sierra passed through it. She stopped at the corner of Washington Avenue and St. John's Place to take in the changing scenery. A half block from where she stood, she'd skinned her knee playing hopscotch while juiced up on iceys and sugar drinks. Bennie's brother, Vincent, had been killed by the cops on the adjacent corner, just a few steps from his own front door. Now her best friend's neighborhood felt like another planet. The place Sierra and Bennie used to get their hair done had turned into a fancy bakery of some kind, and yes, the coffee was good, but you couldn't get a cup for less than three dollars. Plus, every time Sierra went in, the hip, young white kid behind the counter gave her either the don't-cause-no-trouble look or the I-want-to-adopt-you look. The Takeover (as Bennie had dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn't find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides--as if she was the out-of-place one, she thought. And then, sadly, she realized she was the out-of-place one. "
― Daniel José Older , Shadowshaper (Shadowshaper Cypher #1)
