This was me before, when I was
Lilah Jean
Two-seat top down smoothest ride around.
Buttercream sunscreen coins in my bra,
the sand on my skin a doublesweet nip,
sucralose and spice.
Queenie, they called me,
or Jeanie-baby, bikini brown and round
as a golden egg.
(But what’s a cocktail without some lime
to scald those sunkissed lips?)
This was me offering myself
westward, oceanbound, altarbound,
a sunlight sacrifice
tender to the bite of a highway
coiling out to catch
everything warm, anything soft.
(What’s the fun in the hunt
if you’re never the prey?)
Packs of cars in a gridlock snare
cleaved mountains to flee,
and every last one hummed
run little one run.
But the zip-tie freeways bound me tight
and the sunlight lashed me raw.
(Eat like a bird, never a buzzard.
Let the carcass lie.)
Look at me now.
Brown roots and sinkholes
swallowing plum-rouged bone.
Do you see the shade of hate
I use to line my lips?
Do you know my name?
Call me Queenie Cast off Her Throne.
Call me Jeanie-baby-cold-as-shale.
(Black your eyes after sundown strikes.
Prey needs camouflage.)
I’ll tell you the secrets I’ve learned
of this place:
By day it’s a vagabond liar,
a vaudeville ne’er-do-well villain clad in rags,
coaxing doubloons from tourists and dunes,
pawning castoff souls.
But damn, does it clean up nice by night.
Black tie, white-heat summer-boy smile
to kiss the days right out of your veins,
and it mixes a ruthless mojito
heavy on the lime.
(Beware the venom in a gentleman’s kiss
if you’re still warm, still soft.)
This is me after. They call me
Lilah
lily-white
ash skin and opium wit,
pale as undeath, thin as woe.
Get fucked Friday midnight closing time couture
in vinyl black as the absent moon.
There’s sugar-white sand on my lips
and poison in my teeth,
and I know now
how to squeeze someone tight.
illustration is Koga Badende by Koga Harue
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