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This Is a Song for the Good Girl (Or the Lonely)
I draw a black band on my arm with Sharpie
Mourn for America they say
Say! Say Mami with the braids. I like ’em short!
My mom is the only number in my Recents call log
I now understand why Saturn devoured his son
I sleep with the TV on to combat loneliness
Today my cousin turns seven in a twice-drowned city
Every year I tell him he’s a grown man
Lying runs in my family
My sister steals a graham cracker
Animal control comes to put her down
We found a gun in my dead aunt’s bedroom
The silence hangs over us
like a guillotine’s blade
I dream of fish and close my legs
I stopped playing the alto saxophone
The president threatens to drop a bomb
It felt too close to giving birth
The earth holds me like a dead snake in the grass
Each of my days is a failed manifesto
I clench my jaw as to hold myself
Who will Jodeci cry for me as I undo my twist out
What is a man but a pocket
full of rose thorns
They are always so afraid to bleed
I do it without being asked
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Karisma Price is the author of I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Four Way Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. A native New Orleanian, she holds an MFA in poetry from New York University.
[Jodeci is an American R&B quartet formed in 1988 in Charlotte, North Carolina.]
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William H. Johnson, Little Girl in Orange, ca. 1944, oil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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Author: Terence Winch
