Minutemaid: My grandmother always told me: ‘Don’t let men make lemons out of you’ Don’t let lust-filled hands squeeze you into a tall empty glass to quench their insatiable thirst She says temporary pleasure goes from sweet to melancholy Like vivid dreams bound to nightmare lullabies written in the wrong key And that the right man won’t want to squeeze you, he’ll simply admire the outer peeling, For the one planned for you doesn’t have hands that long to slither along your thighs like drunk serpents or eyes filled with hearts made of latex. Too many women with the same yellow liquid that trickles through my veins have been wrung into lemonade by corrupt hands. They strangled their thoughts Drained their imaginations through twisted funnels, drop by drop, sip by sip And filled them with fragile infant sugar cubes that made their lemonade a bit too sweet for the next taster. Now, every man who approaches with his lips slightly parted is an anesthetic that ends the pain for a fleeting minute then disappears, making them realize that they are half empty glasses that need refilling, I remember when they were lemons. Maybe that’s why my branches have thorns. I want to be held by brave hands that don’t tremble. And if they have any cracks they are filled with blueprints written with aspirations so monumental the constellations are intimidated. Hands that can take a callus because my peeling is too solid for the timid, attached to a man whose mind wants to mix me with malt liquor and sip me slowly while reading aloud the autobiography of Malcolm X. So grandma when you see me falling I’m okay. He would sing freedom to my roots Hold the secrets of my past like phone numbers torn from aged yearbooks And would be the reason why question marks bend at the sound of the word enigma Grandmother you taught me not to be minute maid to any man Thank you for being my sunshine.
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.