Yams, Maize and Matzo Ball Soup for the Colonizing European Soul

An Old Western Love Song circa 15th century and counting

After Yusef Komunyakaa

By Regie O'Hare Gibson


Because your kiss
       Codifies genocide into a smoldering
       Coefficient of Arawak flesh. & the crusade
       In your eyes makes me want to fill your
       Hands with severed hands…

For you, my love,
        I’ll assail the seven seas in search of whole
        Peoples to kill. Colonize your mouth
        Print on mind matter. Play a shell game
        With their gods.

There are so many ways
      To love you, it makes me want to rape something
      And bring it to Jesus. When we're apart,
      My instinct to extinct rises
      Like distilled molasses,

& I punctuate your portrait
      With an ellipsis of slave-ships. My need for you
       Is a crucible. No. Is an oven pregnant
       With yellow stars. A charred castration
       Paused for a photograph.

Is a mushroom
       Grafted from wind & fire, blooming
       In the blackening horizon like a bush
       That won’t stop burning.