dezireé a. brown (they/he) is a Black queer nonbinary Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, scholar, and sjw, born and raised in Flint, MI. They are the winner of the Betty Stuart Smith Award from the University of Illinois in Chicago, where they are currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English. They were a Quarterfinalist in the 5th Annual Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship, often claiming to have been born with a poem written across their chest. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Hobart, Cartridge Lit, beestung magazine, and the anthology A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living, among others.

THREE POEMS by deziree a. brown

 

I Love What My Eyes Have Laid Sight On
              
                  after Angela Bassett

You: a gust
              of fresh winter                             air /                          a fountain of eternal / life
an overflowing                            garden of lavender                             that never fails / to bloom

You: survival / reincarnated                                a wellspring / who communes               nightly / 
with chameleons                             for nourishment                                        who built shelter with clay
                            and a dull / knife                        who carved / family
                                                                                             from a block of ruined / ice

You: a poet / again                                               who found the words
                                          they needed / on the underside                             of Hathor’s throne
                            preening between two pillars                     of purple clouds

You see / god                                                         in the looking glass                             you stare into
                                          the [cis] eyes /                                              of the world  
                        with the moon                                                      in your back / pocket
                                                                      you a column / of light

orange glowing                                                          full / of topaz maps                             blessed by stars

 

 

 

reverse supper.

Your brother turns off the cartoon for your nieces
and removes the collard greens from his plate. The warm palm

on your thigh, your wife’s immediate shield, returns to the table. 
One uncle laughs about the rising cost of synthetic oil changes. Your

rose-colored aunt does not. Panic unnestles itself from your bruised 
heart, hidden beneath the dark brown binder. Your family diverts their eyes 

from the man in your face and turns attentively to the head of the table.
Your mother, dressed in her warmest pajamas, extinguishes the fire

in the corners of her eyes and places the matches back into her mouth.
You unwrap yourself from each hug, every grandparent and cousin,

even the ones you haven’t seen since you first learned to write. The air 
returns to a crisp blue. You and your wife get back into the car 

and drive with the sun stretched across the dashboard. You return
to the couch, damp head in her lap. Your phone begins to ring.

 

 

 

Almost Every Book of Poetry Has a Poem about Horses

But too many are already
Matted hair, blue teeth, severed
Or it has been years since they slept
Let this poem be the calling.

dead. Emaciated.
from Bastet’s blessing.
with another under the moon.
A celestial spell. Let it bring our siblings
  [Jasmine Mack]
[Destiny Howard]
[Banko Brown]
[Cashay Henderson]
[Tasiyah Woodland]
[Koko Da Doll]
[Ashley Burton]

back from the dead. Let us
safe from silver bullets, and
together: unravel this thin thread
armor ‒ ancient weapons cut
They are not a metaphor
coastline, sink our knees into bitter
touch and share the same sweet
and trace our names in sand

meet in a meadow underwater,
raise our yellowed voice[s] 
of gender and ready our steel-plate
from bone. These horses are not corpses.
for death. We will gallop toward emerald
water, reach out until our nostrils
air. Together, we will count breaths
left behind by the gods.

 

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