The Warnings in a Mad Dog's Eyes

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Wanda Coleman

The Warnings in a Mad Dog's Eyes

      for Sascha Feinstein

   our hero smacked those liverlips and stared, took the
      blues dare

   imperiously for there were no bitch eyes so rabid--so
      strangely

   stridently beautiful that deserved to go unchallenged

   glassy umber whirls like silt-stirred waters flecked with red
   set in veiny jaundiced yellows

   arrogant and statesmanly in his copasetic pose-jazzman
      by proxy

   he would not look too deeply, fear of music kept his gaze
   askim on their surface where he drifted above that
   marblelike world enwombed by a dreadful though
      speakable lust

        all war and jizz and befuzzed

   and so he cast his eyes askew, pretending to seize-and-size

   betrayed only by a certain shallowness of breath
   and the frosting over of his well-oiled and educated
      blackness

   what he almost peeped was the torrential agony of a
      shewolf alone
   tending her breed, the bitter tender rendings of toothand-claw
   although he heard that prolonged howling--half wind,
      half quake--
   felt it lance his wrist, shiv into his fine southern marrow

   (what he did not deign observe in those fierce orbs rolling
   her three heads each with four eyes, two set correct-the
      one
   in the back of her heads, and those solitary winkers

      in between

   whoa! he denied his ears!

   although they arrived in time to give good listen

      and so
   he saw himself slip comfortably into that rude os, devoured-a
   shredded soul, wordless, paralyzed--a mactation)

   he loathed those low moanings, heard too late even as
   he understood what it was of her that had inhabited him

   what he almost saw in her pain might have saved him

Wanda Coleman's Black Sparrow books (David R. Godline, Publisher, Inc.) include Bathwater Wine, winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, presented by the Academy of American Poets; Mambo Hips & Make Believe (a novel), and Mercurochrome: New Poems, bronze-medal finalist in the National Book Awards 2001. Her new books are Ostinato Vamps, Pitt Poetry Series selection 2003-2004, and Wanda Coleman's Greatest Hits 1966-2004 (Pudding House P). She is featured in L.A. Now, a documentary by Philip Rodriquez, PBS, 2004. THE RIOT INSIDE ME: More Trials & Tremors, Vol. 2 of her literary response to Los Angeles (Native in a Strange Land) will be published by Godine in 2005.