Jennifer Givhan Quotes

The last time I had a dick in my mouth I was dying
alfalfa withered in rows unable to separate desire

from pain There are poets for whom this throbbing
is healing My Frida rail-impaled my
chingona fighting for whole even after gangrene
She loved her body though it betrayed

The balding headstones
of the others - quarantined

from their own mothers & sisters & daughters -
I wondered if they, like us, were strange

alloys of sadness & forgetting
the words to the songs.

What I'm asking is will watching The Discovery
Channel with my young black boy instead
of the news coverage of the riot funerals riot arrests
riot nothing changes riots be enough to keep him
from harm?

My god
is frozen-mouth. She is get-out-of-this-town-

or-hell-freezes-over. She is paycheck
to paycheck. Each night when she goes to bed, my god

kisses her kids' clean faces, then, thanking herself, her own.