09-01-2016
Venus Thrash
Constrained
Behind the Archipelago Hotel,
a stray donkey gnaws frayed
clothing draped on crude fences,
brays all night under a shower
of stars spilling across the sky
spiting darkness. Rastas,
rent-poor, asleep in dhows
beneath a floodlight named moon,
dream a rising sun to wait.
Muslim men in lengthy kurtas
in open sandals stroll the shore's
shallow waters hand-in-hand.
Women in twos, in hot hijabs
curse the sun, cradle bags
of rice or lentils mistaken
for a baby far away. Boys,
as big as ten, shamelessly
nude, somersault from stone
columns into the mighty sea.
Little girls, unconstrained,
in worn red dresses, footrace
shoeless, down narrow lanes,
chaste flesh coarsened by creed,
coated in the town's gray dust.
To The Fems
Who would love us
short haired, butch women,
our eyes unpainted,
our lips unglossed
but moist and ready, spiffy
in pin-stripe suits
& paisley ties, tough
in Timberland work boots,
balling in the latest
Air Jordans, our breasts
pressed close to the chest,
the curve of our hips
hidden in baggy jeans,
our big-daddy strut copied
from the men in our lives,
our muscled arms decorated
in various women's names,
packing plastic cocks
in crotches, punches in bars
smelling of patchouli
or Egyptian musk
our serious hard stare
our easy tears, our brazen
craving for juicy cootchie,
to flip-flop & be topped
by you who would love us
butches, diesels, dykes,
doms, kings, studs?
Cycles
I was born last child of a first child.
Only daughter of an angry woman
On an angry day. An angry time.
I wear my mother's anger
as a badge, claim it for my own,
become its crusader.
I am a woman's voice
who's never been allowed to speak.
Now nothing can contain her silence.
My mother cannot forgive her mother.
I cannot forgive mine.
I nurse rage like a newborn baby.
Rock it. Cradle it. Love it. Hate it.
Like a mother's love, this will never end.
-from The Fateful Apple, selected by Guest Editor Phillip B. Williams
BIO: Venus Thrash was a finalist in the 2012 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize and the 2009 Arktoi Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Beltway Quarterly, Torch, Gargoyle, Folio, and the Arkansas Review, and in the anthologies Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Haunted Voices, Haunting Places: An Anthology of Writers of the Old and New South, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, and Spaces Between Us; An HIV/AIDS Anthology.
She has appeared at Split This Rock, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Schomburg Center for African American Research, Virginia Festival of the Book, and The Library of Congress. Venus earned a Bachelor’s degree in Literature and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from American University and is a fellow of Cave Canem and Soul Mountain. Currently, she teaches fiction, poetry, and is a full-time mother. Venus is in the process of completing The Soul of a Man, a short story collection, and her second poetry manuscript entitled, Misanthrope.
