The spell

I smell him in the leather
of his favorite chair
mornings after he’s gone,
hold brown hairs
found in the dustpan to the light.

The neighbor ladies, who stand
behind the edges of their taupe curtains,
smile as they tell me,
He'll rip you limb from limb. 

They swear his three heads
have turned cats to stone,
that he breaks birds
out of the sky to split apart
their small bodies.

No secret can keep
from being ugly at its bones.
But evil hides its face
in common things. The roses

that bring princesses down with one prick
grow alongside safe flowers,
with petals so red
they look ready to eat.
He has not shown me his face,

but when light ekes under the bedroom door
I watch the black outline of him
lope across the room
to find pieces of his face.

His dark muttering needs no fixed point,
no anchor. By morning,
he is the warm shape of a man
left twisted in the sheets.

I trace my own jaw in the mirror,
draw the differences, the scruff and shag
beneath the ear, build him
from the air around my reflection.

I could not be more bowled over
if I knew the color of his eyes.


BY RACHEL NELSON

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Rachel Nelson is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, where she won a Hopwood award for playwriting. Her work has appeared in Callaloo as well as The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South.