By Edward Toney

Death’s fragrance can be the stench of life’s bowels
It can reside on your lungs like a wet cement
seal the cerebellum in a slab of marble onyx
like the floor in a funeral home
your limbs lose their posture
freedom now a crumbling headstone
with no epitaph

this is the tether that holds dark to midnight
sticky substance that blinds the open nicks in the tongue
gnarls my fingers like dead rose-bud vines
locks the jaws, ravages a smile
turns teeth a dark steel
a jail cell that pre-empts the screams

Hate, this dark liquid glues the throat
turns veins blue-black
this un-clean river slides like a sewer sludge
lungs are tar-feathered
and you breathe like a sea gull
that can’t flap in an oil spill

Hearts pump a ruddy Alabama mud
whatever was alive in the stomach
chokes, the flutter stops, the intestines
writhe like a Black mambo snake
when anger can’t escape
blood becomes a Black paste
a strong backbone molds to the fragile spine
spit becomes a rancid bile
and it taste, tastes just like
Injustice. And now I am stuck
we are stuck, we must pull free
We must pull each other free!