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Menace

His family well-off—his daddy do Hollywood films
his skin a kind of pearl everyone wraps their fingers around
when they hear the news. He was ill, they say,

but not my boyfriend, who carried his father’s infamous name
& thick herringbone chain around his neck. His entire life
a hand-me-down. When they say he was ill

—the young man in Isla Vista, who made shells dance
the ground like a snatched necklace—  
they mean to say mental,

but not my sweetheart when he raised a gun eye-level
at me on his front porch. 

This boy had a European father, an ocean view.
He was sick in a way, a way reserved for clean,
fragile things. He was not quite right, a rich, white
aristocrat who hated blondes.

Quite unlike the boy who loved me—shirtless & oak-shaded,
stinking of summer when he dropped the pistol to his penis,
smirked at me for not having a sense of humor, his gold teeth
loud as the corner streetlight.


by Joy Priest

Joy Priest is a writer born and raised in Louisville, KY. She has received fellowships and grants from Callaloo, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Rutgers University-Newark, where she will be an MFA in Poetry candidate beginning Fall 2015. Her poems and essays have been published or are upcoming in pluck! Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Drunken Boat, Best New Poets 2014, and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, among others.
ISSN 2157-8079
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