half-breed mutt that don’t know her place.

Don’t know how to hold her tongue

or respect the dead. I look up at her,

ready to pry out some sweet forgiving,

but my hand is nailed to the bar,

nailed to the chair,

my body pierced in rust,

I cry—

yo, Jemima, what is this?

Her teeth form a smile at the bottom of her mason jar—

Rot with me. I am your kin.

You come from me.

And when they bury you,

you’ll have my face.

Aziza meets Charlie Parker in an unspecified bar on 52nd Street

and she looked at him and he was a forest of floating caskets and that was just in the eyes and she saw his appetites shovel him at the joints and it is frightening to see a wrist mid-excavation the shock the same as seeing your mother naked to see the scars of your birth on her abdomen she can tell he wants to run away but he has at least ten small graves keeping his body at the counter and what she did next was out of pity and there was no behavior to give it a name a name is one of many small borrowings and she wanted to own something that day she took his liter of whiskey broke the bottle into a set of shark teeth and carved a front door into her neck she looked at Charlie and coughed walk inside this city is perishable but it’s warm here bird don’t you know I would die for you

in a jar

i’m just a set of teeth you know that?

no dabbed lips in compact mirror, no last dance.

i got one piercing on my left ear, it always infected.

cleaning it s’like washing a bullet hole in a window.

you thought this was a stain? ha.

you the same little stupid that thought

water in a jar knew how to be an ocean

once.

maybe twice if it knew how to bite off enuf,

if it knew enuf, knew where the border was.

i don’t know a lot of words

once. i demolished a face with a sentence:

well, i’m leaving.

and i think that’s what an ocean is,

crash me with what’s in me.

i’m a fair fight. one set of teeth on top

of its opponent, they twins, sea on sky. i see it now:

the world’s just one big mouth.

that’s why we hate the ugly things.

an infected earlobe s’like swallowing a cavity.

we don’t have enuf time left

to witness a foul meal. i front porch

with house chewed off. i woman,

muscle screwed down to sweat. i just

try to please the water out.

you know you lose 21 grams the moment you die?

s’like losing 5 teeth.

consider the hand

after Aracelis Girmay

Consider the way a tumor holds:

sweat through, as in a coal miner,

or chilled in back alleys,

outside of a club and myself,

wiping an old night off my face.