THERE IS NO WORD FOR THE FEAR OF WHITE WOMEN by I.S. Jones
To not accept a 'no' as a 'no' is a kind of violence
or for her, a kind violence.
She calls me 'baby' & just like that,
my name & its course lineage is devoured
in the love talk of monsters.
What she wouldn't give
to get her mouth around me.
Something malleable.
Like a petting zoo,
she offers me a government of flowers
buries hand grenades beneath,
keeps the pins under her tongue.
To give in to something so ruthless & manicured,
her archaeology turns something wild & frightened in me.
A fear so old the night & all its loose teeth
know it only by sound.
I'm saying she's the reason hell could be a pretty place too.
after Julian Randall
I.S. JONES is a writer, educator, and hip-hop head hailing from Southern California. She is a second-year fellow with The Watering Hole, BOAAT Writer's Retreat, and Callaloo. I.S. is very Blk &loud about her joy. She received an honorable mention from the Academy of American Poets, her work has received two nominations for the Best of The Net Anthology and in 2016 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the Assistant Editor at Chaparral and Voicemail Poetry. Her works have appeared in The Harpoon Review, Fat City Review, Qua Magazine, The Blueshift Journal, SunDog Lit, Matador Review, Wusgood.black, forthcoming in great weather for MEDIA, Drunken Boat (now Anamoly!), The Shade Journal, the Black Voices Series with Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Hofstra University. I.S. is running for Poet Laureate of the Moon.
The line "hell could be a pretty place too" really got me — that kind of violence dressed up in tenderness is something I've felt but never seen named so precisely. I've been sitting with similar questions about softness and danger over on Daromeon.
This piece hit me harder than I expected. The line about hell being a pretty place stuck with me—I've known people whose charm was exactly that kind of dangerous. I was actually talking about something similar on mimic party juego the other day, how manipulation often wears a beautiful face. Jones writes with such control over something so raw.
This poem really got under my skin—the way tenderness and menace are braided together feels uncomfortably familiar. "She's the reason hell could be a pretty place too" is the line I keep circling back to. I've been thinking about how language can both name and disguise harm, something I ran into while reading about remove watermark from video tools, of all places, where erasing traces is the whole point.
This poem has stayed with me since I first read it. The line "To not accept a 'no' as a 'no' is a kind of violence" is doing so much work — it names something we usually only feel, the way coercion can dress itself in sweetness. The "government of flowers" with hand grenades buried beneath is such a precise image for that. What I keep returning to is the speaker's awareness of her own fear as something "so old the night & all its loose teeth know it only by sound" — that's the part that feels most alive to me. It's a poem about boundaries and what happens when they're ignored, and it rewards rereading. I found myself…
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