If l Start Talking About It Now I Won't Stop Hollering
       

A man once told me sweetness
was the highest quality a woman

could own then put my name
down as Trouble in his phone.

And here I've gone
and said too much already,

for this is the country of fat
threading through muscle,

the land that bleeds corn syrup
and brown rivers that flow

in directions I can never
recall. Stop speaking. Now smile.

This is how you keep
a story from being told—

mothers teach daughters
what knowledge they write

in bloodlines and what they must
trace into silt or wet snow,

each letter erasing itself as soon
as it's exposed. I have learned

that sweetness is love
thrown back in my face.

I have spread a map across
my knees and dreamt of all

the places I could flee—
the better states (not many

after all) with better laws
(my body still not my body

wherever the corn oil sun
rises and falls) and then I saw

a picture of myself as if
from afar listening again

to your endless white boy
search for God—oh, there's

the God in your weekly
poker game, God in your

grandfather's barn, God
in your goddamn manifesto

on human consciousness,
God in your marriage

to a much younger girl
who believes you've hung

the moon, and there's God
in your painted bedroom,

God in the bleakest heart
of your coldest Midwestern

woods—where any woman
would be a fool to go alone—

the God who has been there
for you all along, who was

made to look like you,
who never wanted me.

They tell me, Trouble,
let down your hair. Use it to hide

your eyes. Tell me how,
then, do I still see shame

as it courses through
the aching silence of lineage,

this rusted river that stains
its color on my hands?

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Copyright © 2018 Anne Barngrover All rights reserved
from Brazen Creature
University of Akron Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission