she is ruined without ether
or violet smoke, covers her skin
in jewels. she is the taj mahal,
she’s what happens to little toys
in the dark looking for their toy trucks
and invisible friends named Mogoks
or Bobo. she covers her sapphire bruises
in trench coats and tobacco, covers
her communications with purple and thyme mist.
her crystals are shattered mirrors, her face
barely forming in their cave
like facets. the cut covers her lip. you’d marvel
how she’d look without an eye,
a head. see slashes so deep and red
they hit bone complement her
complexion, her mouth, her lunar eyes.
if she were an angel her wings
would be numerous, supported in
complex architecture from cardboard
and wire hangers they are
monumental, scabrous, mounted by a series
of connections from wire to skin, the thick
of her butt. in her past life, a marine creature, mammary, her skin aquatic, drifted the ocean
floor feeling like a fossil, like the earth swallowed her and held her in its belly, a holding cell
for the afterlife. it is wondrous how her skin would look in a morgue, with her nostrils sliced open, brow bone
in shreds. you’d see it matches her betrothed’s
pearls and floral. you’d say her eyes were charred
smoke and bushfire, smoldering,
skin breaking like a shell, or tribal scarring,
ritual sacrifice, two matching bruises on her
cheeks. the folds of her wings
are scented slaughterhouses, she rides
a donkey of purple thread, its eyes are embers.
her former life, a dog, in a construct of cement and uniforms because her teeth, which must have devoured
Redscar McOdindo K’Oyuga writes in Swahili and English. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in African American Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Foundry, Callaloo, Rattle, Clarion at Boston, Transition at Harvard, SAND,Mandala, One, EXPOUND, Lawino, Jalada, Saraba, Brittle Paper, Poetry Potion, various anthologies, and elsewhere. He won Writivism’s Okot p’Bitek Prize for Poetry in Translation and the inaugural NALIF Prize for Poetry.”