Mississippi Love Song
by Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr.

Vulnerability is the skill to
Remove your emotional jacket and feel
The chill of someone else’s eyes on your soul

But the conversations that follow
Will spark a flame around your heart
Until it becomes a blazer

So when her and I talk
We are never cold

I feel her hands sink into the creases of my ribs
She knows a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach

Her gated lips protect with passion

But if I knock hard enough with mine
I hope to coax her tongue
From defense to strike me down with a kiss

Her front is tough,

The twang in her speech
Are vice grips
So every time she speaks
Her words cut through my barbwire vision
Allowing me to see love without pain

She reminds me of
Begging for answers and actually receiving them

Her hugs, like pillows

Soft, No judgment

She sleeps next to me face to face
That way when I awake she is there to make my nightmares know her by name
And when I return to dreamland the worst that can happen is that she lets me dream about her and oversleep class the next day

We wake up in the middle of the night to discover ourselves in each other’s eyes
She kisses me after i burp

Fuck that

I wouldn’t kiss me after I’ve burped

I begin to remember
She hates her color
I hate that she hates her color
I don’t want to see her imprisoned
on an island of prisms

Where the only escape is an origami boat of self worth,
Sailing through the hurricane
Of learning to love yourself

So if it rains

I will hold her like umbrellas hold the sky

If the sun beats

I will join her hands with mine
And we will dance to the rhythm of our skin tones

Never missing a step

Hips clasped
Souls attached, like skin
Djembe singing, Bass swinging
Hearts sinking into stomachs
Fleeting, like doves

I told her I wont write her poems because she is not
Just another piece
But a piece of me

The twitch in my right eye
Because the one in the left is my mother

So when I envision the future,
I see important women in it