On a summer night along the CT River
where we are stealing time
from the curfew of a park
where no one but the fisherman
joins our nightly company
my tongue keeps calling the mosquito
a king.
Sitting atop the railing
between me and the water,
my fingers loosen without warning
from the swallow of your neck,
investigating your reflexes
and how long the weight of my body
pushing against your forearms
will hold.
You try to teach me about other muscles
and how my tongue can shape itself into song,
lend me your language under stars
but I fail the notes over and over.
I don’t want to sing or trumpet my guilt
for not knowing the origin of my skin
or what languages are christened
in the caverns of my taste buds.
I won’t butcher the beauty,
expose the truth I carry
in my unrooted mouth.
All I know is that I am a girl
who enjoys falling backwards
without warning
into the middle of the night
and the thrill in the risk
of not being caught in time.
I tell you I can’t sing.
But you smile and say
I am getting there.
I’ve got you. Mmema fi
no matter how many times
the king is a mosquito.
Jennifer Steele is a native of Middletown, Connecticut, and a current Chicagoan, and received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2008. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Revolving Door Arts, alongside her service to the young people of Chicago through her work at Chicago Public Library. She is a 2015 fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and her work has appeared in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Callaloo, Columbia Poetry Review, and others. She is the author of A House in Its Hunger (Central Square Press, 2018).
