Obsessive-Compulsive Duplex

Choiselle Joseph

after Jericho Brown

A poem is a gesture towards hope.
My mother hoped to wake one day a palm tree.

One day she took my palm inside her palm.
She traced the treads, said, I can see your future.

At twelve, convinced that I could see the future,
I pictured hell a kitchen black with soot:

the two of us inside, guts full of soot,
our cheeks and bellies swelling to the burstbrink.

If I keep eating like dis I gine burst.
She’d pinch her skin the way you pinch a weed.

My hunger is a hole left by the weed
of her I corkscrewed from my stomach.

I kissed her folds with words she never stomached.
A poem is a gesture towards hope.

Choiselle Joseph is a writer from Barbados. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Rust and Moth, and elsewhere. Her current project is Hummingbird, an in-progress chapbook exploring daughterhood through myth and surreal imagery. They are an editor at The Saartjie Journal. Find them on Instagram: @_choiselle_.