BRIONNE JANAE
AT THE NURSERY
we wander the space between seedlings
two children of concrete reading the paper cards
tucked into the soil learning how best to foster a life
plant in full sun water generously
you trail behind me shining your heat
a sun at my back wringing a damp sheen
of want from my thighs your smile a song
I can stretch and grow in I am running
like rag weed I am learning what it is to bud
and open to sink my teeth into your hip
as if it were the swell and curve of a river
and I a rose at the bank I drink and flower
THE BLACKSMITH AS GOD
After Harlan Mack
with what difficulty you beat
the black face into steel
the sharp tipped shovel pulled from fire
glowering like a fleck of sun
broken off and descending
or the inside of the earth
cracked open your body above
a steady stream of swing
and stretch swing and stretch
movements rhythmic as a piston
pumping the gears of an oil rig
the arm of a crane tossing a ball
into wreckage and from that wreckage
creation and from that wreckage
creation and from the hammer fall
the creases collapsed like canyons
of worry along the smoke blackened brow
and from the battering the battery
the box knuckled battery
not a bruise but the soft round of a cheek
the valley of an eye socket
a nose with nostrils wide and hollowed into caves
a crescent plane of teeth between lips
like mountains plump enough to suckle
how to gaze at the dark unblinking eyes
irises dark as the ripples on a black lake
without confronting the wood of the shovel’s
handle shooting up from between them
how not instinctively to see the hands
gripped and itching to bury the black face
into mud
Brionne Janae is a poet living in Brooklyn. She is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook and Vermont Studio Center Alumni and proud Cave Canem Fellow. Her poetry and prose have been published by the Academy of American Poets, the American Poetry Review, the Sun Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. Brionne’s first collection is titled After Jubilee and was published by Boaat Press.
