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Frederick-Douglass Knowles II
What Happened to Nia Wilson?
9/23/74 -10/24/99
An autumn moon shone over the path behind the plaza parking lot. I'd cut through the hollow complex sprinkled in abandoned carts, ascend the hill and slip through your window to unwrap tongue-tied kisses. We knew not why teenage sweethearts produced bitter men crushing beer cans like eye socket bone. We believed '89 would last forever, sedated in gin, til '97 when we parted secret love but kept unseemly close. Investigation remained silent when you floated like driftwood, naked, down the Thames. Kinfolk (still) gossip the plot of an (ex) Love, an unreliable narrator who snatched you out the party. Police-heads derogated him then ruled you a suicide. Every year for two days my eyes swell like autumn dew in September when your birthday melds into mine. A salt-soaked river carves a beaten path past sullen cheeks pooling into a reservoir of what could have been if our Librans would have tipped the scale back toward a moonlit path unveiling an act of injustice that crushed your tongue-tied kisses into stardust.
Here: a poetry journal
