DARREL ALEJANDRO HOLNES

Your Lips are Copper Wire

after Jean “Cane” Toomer


If we do this, promise me you’ll untie 
the sailor knotted ropes and rescue 
my body. I don’t want to be        
fire’s hostage, scorching, becoming 
a raspberry incandescent.
Promise me you’ll breathe fresh, crisp, opium 
back into my lungs, or at least give me 
the pleasures of erotic asphyxiation,
blurred vision, an entitled giddiness— 
A rouge undertone rushes my face 
and swells my neck as my pulse accelerates 
its ticking in anticipation, and my toes anxiously curl
around the detonator, my muscles contour 
and contract right before you fuel them up, 
right before my body’s inevitable 
little deaths. If we do this, at least promise me,
some kind of flame retardant afterlife. 
Tell me our wings won’t be made of phosphorous 
or carbon, or covered in feathers, or wild silk. Say
this heat doesn’t last forever. Fly me 
to the rock wool garden. Show me 
how to play with matches in paradise 
and not feel the flame’s wrath. 
Though what game is worth winning 
where there is no risk of loss? What love,
where there’s no risk it burns you alive? 
Here, in death’s throat, we men risk the swallow
to savor the cave’s salt and natural gasoline, 
its octane tang, its parched volatility,
to thirst for ignition, for death by combustion,
for the boom, and to, just like that, disappear.
Face to face in a lip-locked detonation
with our greatest fears and greatest courage, 
let’s leave this world big banging into 
the apocalypse no one, otherwise, will survive.  


 
114 The Paris-American

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is a writer-producer in New York. His poems  have been published in Callaloo, The Feminist Wire, The Caribbean  Writer, Lambda Literary, featured on The Best American Poetry blog, and  elsewhere in print and online. 

 

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   Next week's poet:

 Jeffrey Morgan