A Black Woman will not save you iv: I’m every woman! / Guncle
by KINNO
in Fall 2024
Trey Campbell, from Room Service, 2024
A Black Woman will not save you iv: I’m every woman!
And the problem with learning how to woman from a string of songs that kept you company during the cold nights is
: there’s no chance that the women, broken-hearted, belting their souls on one track and digging a pit into divine femininity in the other, will wake up one day and see that the man that made music out of their beating heart bloodied their bedsheets oozing stickiness from their mouths
: promithes promithes that if you woman just right if you keep quiet at all the right times if you let him keep dragging your limp body behind him like a prop you still will not transcend
THE problem is that this is a poem about gender. I was taught by women who above everything else look like they smell good and taste like peaches. I will never ever live to see my voice tempt an angel to sin because I am nothing. I am teeth I am breasts I am cleft chin but only, when the swelling is down enough that you can see my face. I, like them, my mothers in song, thought that if I could just be everything despite the wars raging on my skin if I could just be so divinely graceful as I am chopped and screwed that then I will see into the face of the patriarchy and He will shine light on me and I will be loved.
It so hurt to learn that they who worship at the altar in their Sunday best burn right next to us the ones in genderless rags.
Guncle
My brother-in-law looked watched.
When I picked my nephew up over my head,
swung him around.
Do Aunties not rough house?
Aunties tell you what to do. They tisk tisk.
I do that too.
They call me Auntie.
I call me totalitarian.
Drinks too much with the moms
I really just have no help!
No one lookin out for me!
Potty training, united front.
Nobody wants to wipe your nasty butt!
The girls scream my name when I open the door
I have a key
Girls, you know there are rules in this house.
No ice cream for big girls that act like babies.
No ice cream for me.
Girls girls girls! Do I look like a jungle gym?
[Emphatically] Yes! Yes! Hop on auntie!
Mommy, do you think you could talk to me the way Auntie does?
Long time ago, I said to my oldest niece as she teared up at a dirty eraser, some things get dirty so other things can get clean.
Kinno (she/they) is a Black woman and writer based in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a lifelong interest in literature and has studied it in English, Latin, and Ancient Greek. She loves all things horror and also nature a lot even though she is allergic (she is also allergic to her own perfume but still insists on smelling like flowers!). Their poetry has been published in a gathering together, the Papeachu Review, the BLF Press Black Joy anthology, the Solstice Literary Magazine, Mid Level Magazine, and other journals. Follow them on instagram at @dtturns.
