Her face - poem

she makes the men wonder:

and wonder is the mother of all things men will run back to the same spot where they saw her put on beauty like a night gown:

she was standing flat-footed with her hands on her hips her collarbone a cusp holding her face

she was kissing something:

her lips poised and gentle as if spoken here is the face and the fact that where there is woman something terrible and haunting sings so furiously with a breeze that coos to each and every man alone

she makes them hungry:

for their mother's cooking or the dusk that sits on the house when the whole family is there a generation from tiny to elder and her in the middle

now and forever

I am not talking about the roundness of her body though she sways and the rhythm is like the sea in a bottle

I'm talking about mason jars full of iced tea and her head on your shoulder speaking her dreams just above a whisper and you wondering if you could be in them

Bro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III) is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland's M.F.A. program. He is the father of Asha and Dhoruba and the husband of Karla, and he has been published in Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, Testimony: Young African Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity, Crab Orchard Review, Route One, and Dark Eros. Bro. Yao co-owns Karibu Books, an African (American) bookstore with three locations in the Washington metropolitan area.

COPYRIGHT 1999 African American Review
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group