Green Linden Press

glance

beads of sweat trace our shoulders, our hips little cosines.
bodies tangent, prerequisite to derivative;

me and this woman next to me touch arms for the whole colloquium,
black women holding each other the best we can;

my mother presses my hair, covers my ear with a mason jar lid:
the resultant hot gleaming sheath brushes my cheek like a finger.

grandma reaches for me across the backseat til i shift away,
distracted by primary school crushes and bicycles:

as their wheels whisk through the air,
each point only kisses the pavement for a second.

Lena Blackmon (they/she) is a poet and a scientist. With writing featured in SAND, The Offing, and the Visible Poetry Project, their work is also part of the anthology, Rookie on Love, published by Penguin Random House in 2018. They were named a 2018 VONA/Voices fellow and have previously performed with the Stanford Spoken Word Collective.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2020