Bianca Lynne Spriggs

Medium: A Bop


My dead lover can see only yellow. He apparates 
behind my shoulder whenever I slice lemon,
murmurs I should close my whole fist around 
the hilt of the knife. He complains I am using 
the wrong knife, but leans in anyway
to inhale the sudden spike of citrus.

Your skin,
Oh yeah, your skin and bones
Turn into
Something beautiful

In spring, he accompanies me 
on my walk through the neighborhood
past the hedges of forsythia.
It glows, he mumbles, it glows.
I do not have the heart
to remind him in a few weeks
the blossoms will have fallen off
and be as dead and brown as he.

Your skin,
Oh yeah, your skin and bones
Turn into
Something beautiful

Sometimes, when I ask him what he wishes for
when he walks back through the door of the living, 
he wants to return as a peach or a daisy. 
Sometimes, as a warbler or honeybee. Most days, 
he says nothing, whistles the lyrics to a yellow tune 
none of us remember the words to anymore.

Your skin,
Oh yeah, your skin and bones
Turn into
Something beautiful

 

~


Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow, Bianca Lynne Spriggs, is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky. Bianca is the recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, multiple Artist Enrichment and Arts Meets Activism grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and a Pushcart Prize Nominee. In partnership with the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association, she is the creator of The SwallowTale Project: Creative Writing for Incarcerated Women, and the creator and Artistic Director of the Wild Women of Poetry Slam featured annually at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. She is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications, 2010), How Swallowtails Become Dragons (Accents Publishing, 2011), and the forthcoming titles, Call her By Her Name (Northwestern University Press), and The Galaxy is a Dance Floor (Argos Books). Bianca is the current Managing Editor for pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture and Poetry Editor for Apex Magazine.


~


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