Three Poems by Trina Young
I never knew how a white man saw me
because I didn’t think they could actually see
me. It doesn’t matter how many pretty dresses
you wear; your legs poke out like a fat toddler.
Willy-willy bo-billy-banana-nana-fo-filly fee fi
mo Milly...William did not like me back.
I was so fucking precious, high school and sick.
I saw him on the train one recent Halloween-
Can you imagine the headline?
Lightskin Woman Dressed like Wednesday
Addams Assaults Big Nosed Man on CTA
But no, I’m much too sweet to get my hands dirty
just for that.
The palatable version of me is always picked first!
My arms are much too hairy. I could never
pull off a sleeve of My Little Pony tattoos.
I carry an iridescent knife,
to see what it might feel like to be a man,
to think something pretty is more so covered in blood.
When a white man did look at me, he regarded
me as “an overdressed Black girl.” It doesn’t matter
how tall your boots are, as long as one is pressed
to his throat.
I smoke the blunt he would not partake in (!)
on my walk home, with relish. All mine.
I think white men think I’m the genetic mutation???
They could never admit to finding such an unsure,
big-hipped
crybaby sexy...............
Isn’t it funny how they would never see me
and yet this would make them so mad?
They think we’re so different but I fall apart
quite easily too.
Housefly
after We Real Cool, Gwendolyn Brooks
I’m too fly. I
crawl on the wall. I
mind my business, but I
be knowin. I’m so hype I
lurch lunch wherever I
land, so quick I
dodge every shot I
don’t deserve. I
come back and I
come back and I
come back. Iridescent, I
sneak by the white untrained eye
with wings glittering. Away I
fly, in love with my imperceptible I.
Hospice
A dove chokes down smog in her ring
collared throat and it spreads,
infecting her breast. She is confined
to her nest and radiation treatment
dreams, but with the rapid fluttering out
of her feathers, this isn’t normal molting.
I watch her bald and shrink.
I think I blinked too slow because all
of a sudden she was there no more.
Maybe she was so tiny I inhaled her.
I began to cling to that, that she was
part of me and could help me grow,
to lose the fear of my own wings.
But no. In her absence,
I have wizened into a crow.
Trina Young is a mixed Black writer in Chicago. She has been published in Afterimage Online's Inklight Gallery, Superstition Review, Burning House Press, Kristin Garth's Pink Plastic House, Moonchild Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, and placed third as a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award Winner in the 2015 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition.