ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Faylita Hicks is a black queer writer, mobile photographer, performance and Hip-Hop artist from San Marcos, TX. She was the 2009 Grand Slam Champion of the Austin Poetry Slam. Her manuscript was a finalist in the Yes Yes Books Open Reading Period and the 2016 Write Bloody Book Contest. In 2018, her work was a finalist in the 2018 Cosmonaut Avenue Annual Poetry Prize. She was also an inaugural Open Mouth Readings Writing Retreat participant and was awarded a SAFTA Residency. Her debut book, More Blood Than Bone, is forthcoming Fall 2019 with Acre Books.
Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Slate Magazine, HuffPost, POETRY Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, The Cincinnati Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Kweli Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Matador Review, American Poetry Journal, Five:2:One, Pidgeonholes, Lunch Ticket and others.
She is the founder and Creative Director of Arrondi Creative Productions and an artist on the roster for Hip-Hop Collective Grid Squid Entertainment. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College’s Low Residency program and lives in San Marcos, TX while working on her debut collection, More Blood Than Bone.
Also by Faylita Hicks:
Featuring Tonight at the Street Hustler’s Circus: The Girls
How I Went From Graduate School Student to Amazon Warehouse Janitor
wolf.
whoever.
the sweetbread of your figure is smeared in ScrewMe-red lipstick.
soaked in stale beer & stretched out on the spoiling linoleum. not on
my egyptian cotton or the dingy carpet where i normally find the carcasses.
so i assume you carried me home. i can’t remember where i met you
or your name but the feeling is good. familiar almost. this awake
yet a la carte kind of morning. last night, we were brilliant. fluorescent.
our figures split contaminated light into our broken mouths every time
we came on chorus. that i remember. how we ruined the after-day
this way: with your cocking. the ticking of my ass against the ruddy counter.
like a resonant slap against the faces of our christian mothers & all their bible stories
about ruth & boaz. i was waiting for you. that I remember.
even though i knew that this was not a love story.
not a making of.
a killing.
This American sonnet was written as a whisper, constructed with Rumi’s Whoever Brought Me Here, Will Have To Take Me Home in mind. Growing up in a church that was condemned for it’s cult-like practices, I was never given a chance to talk about sex or safely explore my own sexuality. This poem exemplifies the negativity I then learned to associate with my natural desires. I focused specifically on the story of Ruth & Boaz, as it is one regularly held up as an example for singles in the Christian faith. The idea of the woman laying at Boaz’s feet in the night, waiting for him to choose her after her first husband has died was poignant to me. My own soon-be-husband died in 2010 and now I was faced with finding another mate. I was hoping that I could exemplify how that once important model for relationships was now just a reminder of everything I could no longer have.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
