Ariel K. Moniz

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You settle, sediment in my marrow
ache in my bones, scream and rattle
at the base of my spine, trauma heavy.

That’s where you keep the wandering hands
and the things you did to me in the dark,
there at the crippling point
where I cannot reach them
where I cannot remove them
and burn them on the pyre of misery.

For three days my body aches,
I cannot stand or sleep or cry
without thinking of the way
the pain greets me
how it remembers my face
and welcomes itself home.

A.M.

 

How The Black Woman Sells Herself

Take this skin—

it caught a lot of eyes, wasps to honey

stung enough that I never forgot

where the pain lived, how I slept

or did not sleep, in the sweet-bodied night.

Take these eyes—

they’ve seen what they can

and could not know if they were

drowning themselves or dying of thirst,

and couldn’t change a thing.

Take this flesh—

a meal for bigotry, a season of undoing,

a lifetime of being mid-city school district

and the Lord’s gospel, they’ll all say

it’s never enough or more than I need.

Take this heart—

it still beats around half-digested dreams,

it looms too large in this chest cavity

of headstones and names like graves,

it’s a call never answered or received.

Take them away—

if I must choose emptiness to live

let it come, let me be free.

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Where I Leave Myself

My hopeful heart is more a weapon than a home,
a soldier who longs like a secret to be a medic
but is so much better at wounding than healing,
at leading the charge than holding the dying.

The body is a war, a desperate fight against the self
that is so very good at endings, and the bandage that holds
the whole of us tremulously together.

This is where I most long to leave myself,?
between the work of strong hands and white sheets,
shere the cold scar of my own fear still throbs
and the metal cry of the fallen, dust-hungry beats
command a march to which we rise, bring new sheets,
restock the bandages, sharpen the dagger of muscle,
begins again towards the future.

A.M.

 

Image ID: A bust portrait of Ariel. She has long, curly black hair and is wearing a pearl necklace along with a button up black shirt in front of a white background.

Ariel K. Moniz (she/her) is a queer Black poetess and Hawaii local currently living abroad. She is the winner of the 2016 Droste Poetry Award and a Best of the Net nominee. Her writing has found homes with Blood Bath Literary Zine, Sledgehammer Literary Journal, Black Cat Magazine, and Sunday Mornings at the River Press, among others. She is a devoted reader, womanist, wanderer, witch, melancholy romantic, and a co-founder of The Hyacinth Review.You can find her on her website at kissoftheseventhstar.home.blog, on Twitter @kissthe7thstar, on Instagram @kiss.of.the.seventh.star, or staring out to sea.