Hunger
by Cashavelly
Hunger
Here they come a-hunting after they just been fed.
There’s no end to their hunger until God kills them dead.
They drag us from behind and skin us for our hides.
They bite down and we keep them alive—
How many times before God kills them dead?
Here they come a-stealing the babies from our beds.
There’s no end to their hunger until God kills them dead.
They drag them from behind and skin them for their hides.
They bite down and our babies keep them alive—
How many times before God kills them dead?
I have hunger too as I lay in bed
that your hunger ends before God kills me dead.
Someday you’ll be cornered by soldiers gathered
‘round your bunker with a gun to your head,
alone with your hunger as God kills you dead.
Gunmaker
I’m not a man who raises his hand. Most days I don’t give one god damn.
But I’ve cast enough molten metal to know my hands have known the devil.
How will I pay for this slaughter of the lambs?
The news tells a tale of four killers as I hammer the guard of a black trigger.
Maybe their mothers are to blame. You know, my brother’s a builder by trade.
I could’ve been a builder. I’m a gunmaker.
I dreamed my daughter was a firebomb, who I rocked and sang to all night long.
This trail of bloody dirt and here she stands waiting her turn.
Any man could do her in, right or wrong.
My silver stars shine in their case that I sell to buy my pretty girl lace.
The barrel of alloy on her head, easily destroyed.
Lately, I can’t look her in the face.
Night Feeding
I’m up in the night with my baby.
How many mothers in the world are doing the same thing?
My girl screams in my arms. Is she a wolf or a fawn?
Well, silence wouldn’t save her for long.
Maybe she’s screaming at you,
the kind of man I’ve come to know and she’ll know well too.
Who’ll carve your belly with a thorn so all you make is stillborn.
I didn’t want him so I don’t see him anymore.
My girl, you’re an animal coming nearer in the dark.
Your call is thunder-wide.
All your enemies hide. All your enemies hide.
Maybe she’s screaming at me if again
I trade myself for what’s he’s hunting.
With a rifle’s aim on my head, I taunt him to go on ahead and
take what of my body is left.
My girl, you’re an animal coming nearer in the dark.
Your call is thunder-wide.
All your enemies hide. All your enemies hide.
My girl, when I birthed you on that bed,
like every mother in the world I screamed down death.
You’re the wolf’s teeth in the fawn’s head.
You don’t need him to kill a beast to make sure you’re fed.
My girl, you’re an animal coming nearer in the dark.
Your call is thunder-wide.
All your enemies hide. All your enemies hide.
Hue and Cry
I told Mama he was swinging a knife.
She said, “Don’t worry, he knows wrong from right.”
I told her he’s going to take what’s mine.
She said, “Everything will be all right.”
Then I saw him coming through the pines,
dragging his knife with his mighty bloodline.
The forest was burning from behind.
She said, “Everything will be all right.”
When the children ran, hue and cry,
Mama sang me a lullaby
about a boy who hid in a pipe
and licked rust to stay alive.
I saw his face reflected in his knife.
Like a bullfight, my shirt turned red from white.
In Mama’s arms my veins drained bone dry.
“Mama, is everything still all right?”
Sixteen
I have the will to remain feral
as my body’s sea swells
and breaks my body’s dams.
I don’t want to overflow into the hands of every man.
I sew my legs up. I have to live in the bathtub.
With a lighter, I Braille my skin
and I hammer my feet into fins.
Every day I shed more of my name.
The sun is silver from underwater
as if replaced by another.
Every seam—
sixteen.
My mother comes to me,“What have you done to your poor body?”
I’m like a river with land to devour,
drowning every seed and wildwood flower
on it’s way to the ocean far from this mountain.
The sun is silver from underwater
as if replaced by another.
Every seam—
sixteen.
The ocean never concedes. I have to crawl on my belly.
Underwater I cannot breathe.
Even with fins, I sink.
Had I cut my pattern like a sailmaker…
Ashes White
All night I nurse my lover’s son
who has nothing of my husband’s blood.
Like a shadow on a sheet, oh my baby I hold
from my husband’s hand and a gun.
My husband takes my long mane
and demands my lover’s name.
The name of a stranger is what I gave
and, with it, a killer I became.
My deadly shade of white.
A line of ghosts lost in the pines
and the drum of the march to Calvary
to keep us pure and white.
My husband returned and told of his fight,
dragging a man to the coke ovens that night.
He burned him from black to ashes white,
the stranger I crucified.
My deadly shade of white.
A line of ghosts lost in the pines
and the drum of the march to Calvary
to keep us pure and white.
Who Will Testify
There is a river in my hometown you think belongs to you,
as it siphons little bodies drowned and smothers white roots.
Where’s my darling one?
Pulled under the wave of your wake,
washing the shore away.
Have you undone enough?
Who will testify to your life?
Always searching for a bigger beast to leaven your hands.
Only your beast is the boy within you drown to make you a man.
Where’s my darling one?
Pulled under the wave of your wake,
washing the shore away.
Have you undone enough?
Who will testify to your life?
School Girls
The dancer will be executed.
Her age will show.
On display, she will atone,
wearing the gauze of her last role.
She draws on her face
for the pleasure of the full house.
With her teeth, her tongue bound
in her pretty, little, pink mouth.
Good heavens, girl,
watch the show wherever you go.
Call her pretty and toss her gold
and the school girls taking blow by blow.
She dances like a minstrel.
So does her replacement.
A sign on the backstage door
to warn the others she’s a whore.
Good heavens, girl,
watch the show wherever you go.
Call her pretty and toss her gold
and the school girls taking blow by blow.
The Altar
To be made of alabaster.
The carved and the carver.
Don’t you know the statue envies the altar?
I am my own father.
To wander the desert,
unafraid of the thirst.
Don’t you know your true shape is water?
I am my own mother.
To the locust swarm,
where some protect and some harm,
where some eat what belongs the other.
I am my own sister.
I am my own brother.