soul glo

this is for the chain strangled in your daddy chest hair 
the white cutlass red velvet
seats and interior the naked
lady silhouette floor mats the yellow 
activator bottle in the console
for you 

strolling your leather sandaled feet across the sea
of grandma’s yard to the trailer 
how you cleaved 
it like the end of a rat tail comb 
through thick hair with only the force of cool

black moses shifting the gravity 
of grass beneath you 
sheer luther vandross poise 
i’ve seen sky since 
but nothing like the one above your starry juiced head 
to see the glint of cosmos roiled 
in your curls as you lift me towards sky one handed 

hint of bumpy bottle tanqueray in your glass too cool
to dance fuck those basketball shoes you mended 
with carpenter’s glue and the trifling niggas 
that laughed at you not knowing you were a god 
with his shirt open chains burrowed like gold lace
in the calligraphy of your chest hairs

walk with your hand bent back like money 
will find you

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brittny ray crowell (@braycrowell) is a native of Texarkana, TX. She is the recipient of a Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize judged by Major Jackson. She recently participated as one of the librettists for the Kennedy Center’s Cartography Project. Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, Frontier, The Common, The West Review, Copper Nickel, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is a teaching assistant and PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston and a poetry editor for Gulf Coast.