The Best Kingdoms have exits

By Deon Robinson

Heat makes rabid dogs of boys with sawed shotgun noses. There is nothing to fear but fear itself, a man said that looking into a screen that reflected his own face. Take nothing lying down, not a hand, especially one that wraps around the hand so tightly. 

The world is as long as a bedroom, depending on who you are that is either terrifying or enlightening. Enlightening, like the hurricane that clapped its hands over my father’s house the summer he bought his first property. Terrifying, like the shovel’s singular tooth used to bury a horse who has done God’s work and then some. 

A beating, a storm of limbs aimed towards your pretty face. Don’t defend yourself. Don’t keep your hands up longer than necessary, your blood is climbing upstream and no one has the energy to be impossible. 

Think of where you’ve buried your horses. Find those bones, look at how they fractured a truth like a stained window. Are you sure it’s safe to pray around broken glass?

Deon Robinson is an Afro-Latino poet born and raised in Bronx, New York. He writes poems on bus windows.