Simone Person
Keep Sweet
Home alone, twelve-year-old me let in the man
claiming to be our landlord’s new painter
because already I was used to doing what men told me.
He measured and pencil-marked the walls, the baseboards.
Later, my mother was furious. Rattled off all the crooked
things my body could be made to do. I was sorry, but unsure
what for. In every version but mine, I’m to blame. I’ve never been
good at noticing when the lights have long been turned off.
Always, I’m that bitch keeping the genius from writing.
Or, the cunt who can’t deal with rejection. Often, the fat girl
too desperate to realize she’s been waxed over.
There’s a boy I loved thick and heavy who will find
his name in this poem. Who will find his name in all of my poems.
Him, as close to me as shadow, manages to see every word
somehow cradling him. He fashioned me into vessel. A hounding thing
with an endless need for his flat-dumb tongue. In a man’s hands, I only let
the painter in because I’ve always known how to poison. Leaden gold
in every mouth. As if a man ever found himself inside me without trying.
Simone Person is a Pink Door fellow and became Prose Editor at Honeysuckle Press in 2018. She is the author of Dislocate, the prose 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.
Return to May 2020 Edition
Home alone, twelve-year-old me let in the man
claiming to be our landlord’s new painter
because already I was used to doing what men told me.
He measured and pencil-marked the walls, the baseboards.
Later, my mother was furious. Rattled off all the crooked
things my body could be made to do. I was sorry, but unsure
what for. In every version but mine, I’m to blame. I’ve never been
good at noticing when the lights have long been turned off.
Always, I’m that bitch keeping the genius from writing.
Or, the cunt who can’t deal with rejection. Often, the fat girl
too desperate to realize she’s been waxed over.
There’s a boy I loved thick and heavy who will find
his name in this poem. Who will find his name in all of my poems.
Him, as close to me as shadow, manages to see every word
somehow cradling him. He fashioned me into vessel. A hounding thing
with an endless need for his flat-dumb tongue. In a man’s hands, I only let
the painter in because I’ve always known how to poison. Leaden gold
in every mouth. As if a man ever found himself inside me without trying.
Simone Person is a Pink Door fellow and became Prose Editor at Honeysuckle Press in 2018. She is the author of Dislocate, the prose 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.
Return to May 2020 Edition