Firefly
Safi Brown
When God said “genesis”
We went ahead and mistook it for shame
I’ve seen dogs hold their tails between their legs after
Pissing in the wrong place —
We are not the only creatures
Bound and abandoned to bad habits and self aware ness/ I know after a long winded harvest of mean dreams and super villains: that a Mecca of art like stuff awaits on the other end,
This awkward cannibal keeps eating finger nails and hair follicles because — well shit he means well and is trying to stay off the hard stuff, i.e. human flesh — the boogey man is a misunderstood sociology professor/ who drinks too much and misses his daughter/ my fingers are swollen from clenching to the attics in mason jars/ I wear a necklace of fireflies that I don’t know much about/ dark times only await when I stand still long enough/ words are stagnant with their history/ violence leaves my body every time I choose “Love!” And we are Mavericks on Sunday’s/ she is a Pisces/ so is my father
I am a Virgo so is her father/
Her hands do enough work to engulf both my collar bones — I collect her laugh for Monday’s/
Violence leaves my body every time I choose “God!”/ all my friends are made from
Sky paint and retribution
All my friends
All my friends
I choose to love them radically/
I do not like hugs and forehead kisses
But I love the sound of a women’s voice with my ear pressed against her chest — I dream in places that remind me of my mother on a good day/ another poet shot himself in the mouth he combusted into dandelion seeds/ I’ve spread him out in corporate concrete hoping for release/ she illustrates “love!” With moon dust and fish scales —
How God it is to know this/ an African woman was dreading my hair when I was 10 she read my palms and said I ought to be a writer, I wrote a story about the water when I was in third grade, my mother has kept it since/ she is an Aquarius and bares high water like horizon shards/ my father is a Pisces and has fins like a Pegasus/
I wrote a poem for my grandfather, signed it with all my love and god does not belong to me
And god does not belong to me/
But there is a swell hummingbirds between my ears because they work hard to stay alive —
I work hard to stay alive
So do all my friends
All my friends are awkward cannibals staying off the hard stuff,
I bite my nails and used to pull my hair out and burn it/ I blink too much when I’m nervous because I am taking snapshots of time/ I only know the sun and moon and fireflies/ I did not know you can shake them
Dead in mason jars/ I did not know that I’d been playing dead for many years/ i revised the fireflies to shed light and edit death as a less tragic thing/ I told god there are starving babies and a war going on/ so please let me be/ he had none of it/ he has all of me/
Water is just outer space/I saw a turtle the size of a living room once!
Chickens are tiny dinosaurs and human beings are little apes —
It makes me smile when I realize I live in a sphere/ I want to learn god all at once so does she/ so do all of my friends
I’ve been called a firefly a second time in this life/ there are not many rooms for coincidence/ I walked into a coincidence maze and it was satirical and strange/
I walk into a god hole and it was unsettling and big/
I do not know the difference between fireflies and lightning bugs/
I know they both huddle on the upsides of my heart,
I know they are small and seek the opposite of oblivion —
I am also small and seek the opposite of oblivion
I believe in the dark sides of “god!”
I believe it doesn’t make them any less godly/ just elongated thick skin
And there are no tricks here/ just a cacophony of some new things to learn.
Like the way violence sings out of our bodies and manifest in mercy.
Brutality walks into a room/
Filled with fireflies and rainbow fish from the moon/ I give you my hands unclenched and divinely feminine
To say: look how far we’ve come.