Cactus Thorns
After Christine Sloan Stoddard’s “Abuela the Human”
Cactus thorns are no less painful for the unconscious.
Pain doesn’t just drift away with your mind.
Your mind still remembers the piercing,
the trickle of blood down the side of your body.
Your body remembers the locking, the delirium,
the roughness your knees felt when pushed in the ground.
The ground offers you no feather bed nor does
it warmly blanket you with roiling sand.
Sand can only creep into the injuries and begin to spread
throughout your whole self until you feel completely brittle.
The brittleness breaks you down and you remain lost in
the desert, stripped of your being until you remain a skeleton.
A skeleton left clinging towards a beacon, only to find that
cactus thorns are no less painful for the unconscious.
Their Own Favorite Songs
After Suzi Q. Smith’s “Homegirl”
In my neighborhood, women walk like they are their own favorite songs.
The beat fluctuates with the way their hair bounces as they walk to the bus.
The bus stop can barely contain the rhythm as the ladies sit
in front of the realtor’s ad on the bench or stand against the plexiglass.
The plexiglass forms the recording booth, as their scattered conversations
form choruses and bridges to their power ballads and one-woman anthems.
These anthems pour out as more women join them at the stop,
some offering a remix as they set their grocery bags down on the ground.
The ground cracks as one woman has to mind her stroller, pushing the
plastic wheel back and forth to add record scratches to the mix.
The mix can get cacophonous against the conflicting sounds of
the morning rush, but I can pick out the earworm when I pass by.
I pass by and admire how these women create music every day, because
in this neighborhood, women walk like they are their own favorite songs.
Alex Carrigan
Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has appeared in The Broadkill Review, Sage Cigarettes, Barrelhouse, Fifth Wheel Press, Cutbow Quarterly and more.
Visit carriganak.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @carriganak for more info.
Header image by Marcos Paixão.
