A Poem by Mick Powell

Mick Powell

31 May 2017

Mick Powell’s poem, “u be a fang // i be a body,” will be published in Apogee Journal Issue 09.

i am thinking of fire forgiveness my mother (and fire)

Ma, didn’t you want / to know how / i mantra’d
my bullied mouth into water sound? how

(i got)

atlantic / atlantis / disappeared the raw red
and became a city of calendar? how i

(haunted)

the ghosts & the gods / turned my body / black
tourmaline? thumbed into the aloe plant

(and)

ate its nectar / to soften between my legs / to bury myself
in a casket of peach skin? didn’t you

(want)

to know how / i learned to braid hair / in the dark
or how i crawled open my jaw? how i imagined sage

(burning)

between my teeth / imagined / all the earth’s
smoke ashing me into small? my soft spot

(or)

how i sabotaged / it / when it became
turquoised and rib-boned? brimmed with violent

(apology)

Ma, didn’t you want / to know how / i ripped
all of the baby teeth from myself that night?

(i made him)

a raw red place / to put himself / instead of
down there, where all it did was

(flame)

apogee, Apogee Issue 09, Mick Powell, Poetry

Mick Powell

Mick Powell (she/her) is a queer black fat femme feminist poet who likes revolutionary acts of resistance. She is currently an MFA in Poetry candidate at Southern Connecticut State University. Mick obtained a B.A. in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies and a concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Connecticut in 2015. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Black Girl Dangerous, Winter Tangerine, Crab Fat Magazine, The Fem, and two anthologies focusing on black feminisms and Beyoncé. She is one of the Associate Editors of the Emerging Feminisms section at The Feminist Wire.