How You Might Appear

The lab results record flags
on an unspoiled landscape

as coup d’etat. Children
draw to her ferrous scent.

Men side-eye temporary
breasts. They get blamed.

She’s spent too much time
missing the seasons tapered

to nights you were mistaken
for an unmet condition or

worse, stickiness to wash
away. Redact any magic.

After years simmering mutiny,
evidence of the coup dots the report,

red flags on new colonies.
She imagines blood fertilizing

lush an overzealous womb.
She imagines a new magic;

coagulations verdant against the
topography, green as summer.

______________

darlene anita scott is a writer and visual artist. Author of the poetry collection Marrow and co-editor of the creative-critical volume Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, her recent writing appears in Witness, Obsidian, and Revolute. Her art can be viewed in The Journal, The West Review, and The Journal of Compressed Arts and her photography in Barren Magazine, Auburn Avenue, and Persephone’s Daughters.