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How to Find the Center of a Circle

                                                      "Of all the things that happened there
                                                             That's all that I remember.”

                                                                  —Countee Cullen, “Incident” 

(x)2   

The first time
with those     
molten syllables   
at a skating rink           
spun around me                 
I didn't know                  
but my body              
Ugly       
as two white boys           
they curved               
a little girl             
felt            
How  
I told the teacher             
But what about     
with the red                     
in her ears?            
​you are branded   

​by Tiana Clark

+ (y)2   

​I
red hot
as searing lassos
they 
silking    
what  
was blackened       
marked  
taunted me 
the loop of       
crying          
my selves    
did I know                   
and she             
the little girl   
hot g sounds                            You never forget    
with iron—             

=(r)2   

was called a nigger
g sounds, 
around my neck
like white spiders 
a carousel of hate.   
the word meant      ​
wrong with heat.
a radius of shameful skin
on roller skates,
my circumference. I was
in the center of a circle—  
begin to double. 
I was different?
put them in timeout.  
rolling away, struck
ringing fire songs  
the first time 
​seared raw, permanent.

Tiana Clark is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recent recipient of the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. Tiana is an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University. Her poems have appeared in Word Riot, Rattle, Crab Orchard Review and Best New Poets 2015, and are forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, The Offing, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. Find her online at tianaclark.com.

​Read more...

Broken Ghazal for Walter Scott
ISSN 2157-8079
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