GROOVE THEORY & STRAWBERRY MOON
DANI JANAE
GROOVE THEORY
What is in the telling? Speak. Up.
No man ever listens to the body.
And who are you to take my silence
for permission? To take of what you
would have at all? Caul baby.
Groove theory. Phenomena of
severed tongue. I never got to say
what I meant when I couldn’t
speak. With your mouth over mine.
STRAWBERRY MOON
Sit beside me. Open your mouth. Here you will find desire for royal cherry, blueberry, fig, golden peach, apricot, nectarine. Desire will be enough. All those years you forbade yourself a taste of sugar. Cutting your skin against the bramble as penance. Tonight, you will lick the trail of juice rushing toward your elbow. Tonight, you will forgive your body for the way it looks in the light. Forget the way you wretched and howled in the locked room with warm walls. You ought to dance the way witches do: with every intention to meet the sky. You are alive. Make something of the pit at the center of your sigh. Stop where you are and build a home from the roots of the dogwood, Japanese lilac, southern magnolia, smoke bush. Take bloom, the green world is waiting for you: crape myrtle, wisteria, rose blossoms, sourwood.
Dani Janae is a black lesbian poet and journalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has been published by Longleaf Review, Swim, Rhino Poetry, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She posts on Substack at No Skips, Fig Widow, and Ask A Queer Doctor, and she can be found at danijanae.com.