Sean Flood
HYDROQUINONE

Black skin tastes better when
the wheat has already been
threshed; just a kiss. I watched her “paint
her face” from the field through the
broken
window. Death bruises like a
tornado; the land is new. We had

only just arrived when the
tornado came and tore everything
up. Watch the eye sweep him up into

the vortex; he is your husband.
Burn
these documents, they are
your slave papers. But there

isn’t any slavery anymore.
Ditch behind the house; they
cut
the ditch so deep they might as well
have made for China where the widows
grieve just as they do here: by hitching
up their bloomers and getting a field

hand to remind them what desperation
tastes like. He needn’t be black;
everyone tastes the same in the dark. Give
him a pair of rough hands, feeling heart,
shoes with
torn
tornado-scarred soles like lips.

Sean Flood is a writer and poet. His work has appeared in The Bombay Review and Black Ink. Favorite hobbies of his include playing old Nintendo games and daydreaming. Read his poem Aloha in Cleaver’s Issue 18.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #17.