Proud Flesh
My rapist is a good boy.
Kisses his mama. Soaks her in salts
and places her up so high
no man but him can touch her.
My rapist wants
to love but don’t know how.
Ends up with all the wrong girls.
Can’t seem to find one that’s not crazy.
My rapist talks real clean.
Always has the right answers.
He built a whole world
where I was unbruised and had no name.
My rapist loves women.
The ones he can fit ripe
under his thumb.
My rapist smiles like the moon.
Makes you drunk from the shine.
Calls it your fault.
I’m Sorry for the Things I Ate When I Was Angry
Because that’s what you’re looking for, right? A razing
of all this body. You only want the fat girl when she’s torn open
her cruel underbelly and spotlights how her shame glistens
slick. A friend, number-sick like me, lamented my lack
of hiding. Everyone knows your weakness. Branded fatness
the worst sin. I’m no shiny cherub. What you want is my thickened
awakening. I have no crown or glory. Lost the sweetness
from my breath. Yes, I have wasted this body. Shackled
to my own dumbed wanting. Did it before any man could have the chance.
Stop searching through me for inspiration. I’m no one’s fat queen
or before photo. My hands won’t cup to catch your praise.
I have built toward apocalypse and am too stubborn to turn back.
Simone Person is a Pink Door fellow and became Prose Editor at Honeysuckle Press in 2018. She is the author of Dislocate, the fiction winner of the 2017 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest, and Smoke Girl, the poetry winner of the 2018 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. Simone grew up in Michigan and Toledo, Ohio and is a dual MFA/MA in Fiction and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She can be found at simoneperson.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @princxporkchop.