____________________ a dozen craft vignettes
Khadijah Queen
after Clare Rojas
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If petalesque fingernails absorb the couple’s palmed diamond-shaped leaves as they face one another, heads bowed, pointed shoes overlapping—they are not a couple
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Her gray hair and XL muumuu say mother of the bearded man.
The grassy hill behind them looks soft, and multicolored wheat stalks make him dance—another dunce-capped golfer hiding from snow patterns
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Her triangular mouth leads the smaller ones in, figurines carting more hoard than they think she can handle. In her head-scarf and stiff burgundy A-line, the largesse, all hers—
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A slight imbalance about the face. Leaning toward a trio of doorways as if about to move, decided against. She wears men’s boots and a mouth so dark a red you know the wound cannot heal.
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They don’t want to exchange blue daisy bouquets. Then, most delicate in her hand, he leans away. They fight, the marmot between—
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She says, I am bigger than you and I grow in half. My vest + your cardigan match – orange-red. Our anger makes us positive.
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The red-eyed rabbit eats a trio of inverted seams at the solstice. All the tri-colored tulips slashed from their bright stems.
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Now the blue poppies want some of this horse-legged woman leaning back:
Her smile cherry and tilted
Her yellowed sleeves belled at the plainer wrists
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Looking back to the overloaded bookshelf. Her lips almost a black beard, so wide a sham grin upward. One open on her lap, to a blank page. Her sailboat dress and X-acto point toward black books and a sinister reflection of braided orange carpeting in antique window glass.
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Dogs as primary colored wolves at her feet
Wet beaver hat snowflake socks—
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A flower sword that has two sharp petals, deadly beige, piercing wagon wheel shields as opponents bleed rainbows, freeze mid-March
Their faces turned away from the ribbon treasure well in hand: double eagle star, hexagonal chunk of sky
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Rainbow upside down, denting the earth. Wilted red poppies attack.
He feeds the largest the shadow of his hand.
Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit and Black Peculiar, which won the 2010 Noemi Press book award for poetry. Individual poems, four times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, appear widely in journals and anthologies including Best American Nonrequired Reading, jubilat, Spillway, Aufgabe, and Fire and Ink: A Social Action Anthology. Prose appears in Memoir, Cutthroat and forthcoming in The Force of What’s Possible. She is a Cave Canem fellow.