Three Poems | Zaji Cox

Bacchus, Caravaggio, Wikimedia Commons

Cleanse

I burned sage to clear the air of her

but she lingered,

stuck around my cluttered and dark room, sucked

at the available air, until there

was hardly any left to breathe. I kept waiting

for her to come back, to come up from behind

and press her fingers onto my face,

to dig her nails into my eyes

and stick flecks of silver polish

on my chin. I shower in cold water but still

feel her scratch down my back,

leaving raw red marks on my skin.

The Followers

Hedonistic heathens

will drink the night,

will taste ten thousand daisies

in a rose-colored city.

They will stumble in shadowed groups

under stringed lights

with mouths wide open,

drinking, grinning, falling

into each other’s arms

and sway by the road

on their way to the forest.

The heathens follow none

but their pleasures. In the trees they grasp

at each other’s palms,

reaching, wanting,

and taking. Wolves dash

at the sound of their hoots and gasps

for air in the dark. And they do not settle

but collapse, in a confused tangle,

a shared embrace like twining ivy—

a firmness that nature itself would envy.

The Mane

Today I let them see my mane. It is out

in a dark magnificent mass about my head,

not quite straight,

not quite wavy.

My mane is not like what’s been seen before—

at least not by those

who come to gape and pet,

with timid and gentle fingers.

After yearning to touch it for so long,

The fingers treat my mane like it may at once

be a thick enough jungle to trap a hand

and weak enough to fall out in clumps at a caress.

But it can handle the exploring clumsy fingers

that roam and pull its wisps up to watch them fall, the fingers

that squeeze handfuls of this new territory.

I watch a new merging

of amusement and confusion:

It’s not what they thought it would look, feel, move like.

It does not frame my face like the manes they know.

It is exotic.

I am exotic.

So strange, isn’t it?

But it won’t bite. I won’t bite,

bare my fangs with a low growl

at the errant touch.

No, today, I suppress any urge that rises

to my surface and struggles

to claw its way out. I am not ashamed.

I tell myself:

I am not ashamed.

I, forcing pride, let the hands pet my mane,

my exotic magnificent mass.