Where My Spinal Fern is Cording
BY NIKKIN RADER.
It is easier to deploy missiles
behind a screen than to
gut a man with your diploma,
I can knive you with an
unlike while you skin my legs for
flesh scarves when you’re cold
from modern living. You are not
a person, an empty entity, a body
I can maim by fearful bullet, you
bleed stereotype and smell of animal,
hubris denied.
I cannot connect with that which I box on display.
beastly thing this social monster we feed it blood daily
to sustain its strangle parts, lacing these oceans with money
my friend asked if he should join the military
or choose the apple, number one business
in the world, wondering if the symbol
means eve or other fruition of knowledge.
he’s never seen this kind of shit before,
what rotted core can become legitimate,
like a living machine,
efficiency toward craze.
dissociative or national agenda?
what it means to be waiting for a bus
that’s never going to come,
hoping all tongues remain
tied to the bench of complicity
it’s like being stuck in a perpetual battle on the rooftop because
you made a deal with the devil to cycle til you never lose this fist fight
walls holding these tensions we cannot dissolve or match;
what happens when you win?
nothing
cut off the ones that
yearn to lick your insides,
the human you buried
unmarked, these feral cords
between us severed
by wires,
my screen to
numb the way
you think you think you are.
Where My Spinal Cord is Ferning
BY NIKKIN RADER.
There is a consumption of smoke
off U.S. 101 on our way to Eureka,
where the Eel River weaved into
national forest.
Black is oak tree or there is a
barn amidst the flame atop the hill.
I’m told black is usually shingles, as
constant as how the
village cuts men.
Smoke otherwise white or brown a
kind of grass clouding, until the
bombers are dropping napalm,
smothering out what consumes the
mother.
By then, everything is tinted orange when
the smoke reaches the sun.
Even the queen’s lace isn’t white anymore.
I forgot to rise with ashes.
Nikkin Rader has degrees in poetry, anthropology, gender and sexuality, philosophy, and other humanities and social science. Her works appear in Occulum, the Mojave Heart Review, littledeath lit, peculiars magazine, and elsewhere. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter @wecreeptoodeep.