Curtains

After Deana Lawson

babysleep (drape)
stage every canvas. haunts the iris.
the backdrop says parlor. plies her flat
Vaseline as stitched sea velvet, as
baby’s soft, oiled cheek. the viewer’s
opaque fail. tumid and hip, the weave’s
dazzle mantled wall and cloistered night
sun like women, black and lipstick. be
kept from. semantic, switch of lovegrass
black and apple, flung stars in heavy
sienna dust night, burning like hot
comb temple altar and kneeling night
host, assembled into body’s stock.

Whose held belly at center she frame. Situs poised true
in situ. The Africanist of glimmer gaze upon
dark nations in return. The sifter, supplants glitter.
oiled and brandish, rouge and lippish, fetish and brogue, thick
lipstick, swole blue hip, the wish and the aureole, the
saddle and the want nipple, the ones high priestess doing
a high thigh curtain, unlashed in soft netting, unleashed
in that poppin’ hair, or that grassy flat, gods beginning,
or not so Venus, sung to the oblong glare, women
mustering, a host of sistren, the host of our lost black
semantic doubling over heavy sienna. It’s
the viewer’s failure to weave and dazzle at artifice
in lust with hot comb burn and altar kneeled to the back
at home temple, us like a body in a stocking, some

days, lip o’ lovely in rainbow crotch shot. How I love
her stung blue sofa, crouched and ejaculating hifi
hydrant sprung from childhood’s articulate couch. father
disrobed and hung like a thoroughly dented drape, against
the dismantled, fussy mother and burnt afterbirth
spilling along the interior lawn hosed and shiny
and thus diluted melanin sibling packaged in
blackgrass and star apple and flung one side of the fawn room
to the next. what black women be kept from. that loom look
haunting the iris. hurled into the flat black of baby
sleep, the intentional length goes on among infants’
witness, from the rhythm of tone in a sister’s hip. her
lovers dressed inside huge tits. the sag coo you amply
finger. the radiators hissing up the thin, sheer seams.

(drape) sleepbaby

through days spent between body, and so
midlove in the hydrant sprung of green
living, an articulation of
sex and notice, whose father’s grass makes
humus earth, genetic. In other
words, some gods begin in a sleep swing
grassy infants, marked by netting of
bush; that poppin’ hair; wombs of couple
fucking. the splendid melanin of
dirt soil, drench planets, brandish and rogue
rouge and lippish, rough witness behind
curtained lash, the birth of lovers dressed
easily soft inside black’s huge tits.