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Poetry Issue 15

Nefertiti Asanti- “leftovers”

mommy always pregnant full of anger because someone left a dirty dish in the sink or full of ideas like let’s build a fireplace or let’s make apple pie from scratch without peeling the skin off the apples, you know, for the fiber. mommy always pregnant but she ain’t never had another baby after me & always calls herself fat. & i know pregnant ain’t the best word for mommy’s tummy but fat feels false, like a cuss word even though i know mommy likes to cuss. shit i like to cuss too! but never in front of mommy even if she decides to call some random kid who sat on the hood of her car a pussyface nigga in front of me & my best friend, like we not supposed to belly laugh about it. most times mommy don’t realize how funny she really is, like how you expect us to get ready for an ass-whoopin when you start acting out exactly why we gettin beat to begin with. mommy gets into character with the quickness, kinda like how those yt guys like to reenact the civil war only mommy is being me & more like a fuddy-duddy version of me who knows better than to break her good china, sweep it up into the trash & when she come ask about it say uh, i dunno. sometimes if me & my brother laugh hard enough at how mommy plays us, mommy laughs too & decides not to whoop us & instead we just go to bed without dinner which is fine because it was leftovers anyway.

 


Nefertiti Asanti is a writer, cultural worker & occasional performance poet from the Bronx, NY. Nefertiti is a fellow of The Watering Hole (2016, 2017), Lambda Emerging Writer’s Retreat (2018) & a founding fellow of the Anaphora Writing Residency (2018). The Queer Cultural Center commissioned Nefertiti’s writing and performance work-in-progress Black Blood Is… for the 2017 National Queer Arts Festival. Nefertiti has also read poetry for the 2018 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest. Nefertiti’s work can be found at Winter Tangerine, AfroPunk, Foglifter, & elsewhere. Visit Nefertiti at nefertitiasanti.com