R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn after the riots of ’68. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Callaloo, Ploughshares, Best Black Women’s Erotica, Bum Rush the Page, Ms. Magazine, and is forthcoming in Bloom, Our Caribbean: Writing by LGBT Writers of the Antilles, andQuotes Community: Notes for Black Poets. She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the […]
for rd In the farthest forest of my experience, amongst ancient ferns and a sun that shines for hours, your square shoulders are set against the truth you’re telling me. I always know when I’m not the only one. I told you so at lunch, while Josh, oblivious, stared into his soup […]
a hound in sweat, I stalk a trail purposefully left, the rolled cotton sausage of your tampon on the floor at my convincing. If this continues a month or more, we’ll both be sticky in it: when the smell and chemical of us wracks our bodies with the same tide internal. I do not have […]
n this kind of sea, floating really matters. The well-groomed otter is a tail above the others. Her particular sheen, the curve of her brown, the arch of her back, the clams that she cracks – to be groomed is the key to survive in this sea. She smooths each natty lump down, […]
i. penitent The entries are usually in black. This entry is painted in blue. Paint head. Everyone trying on a new voice for size. In separate accounts, a corridor. Dust and rank, humid echo. Your footsteps carry here. You weave among stone columns, erected to an open sky. Walls nonetheless. Across the plaza, Thoth. […]
You faggot, says Naquan to Isaiah and I know he means you idiot, you beast, you stupid, barely human acting-like-you-don’t-know-any-better because that’s what faggots are to 14 year-old boys– at least in public, to each other, in front of girls and teachers, where everyone can see. We’re reading a book about a masquerade and […]
i stand quoting shadows of all the things i could have done life dismissed beneath this red leaf’s brilliant death winter breath and stone harmonies send out subtle radars to come and predict the weather, like we tore the tissue and read it under the lens too late to save our mother if only we […]
R. Erica Doyle Q&A on the genesis of her poem, Faggot: A Definition.