Tiffany Haddish As A Recipe for Joy During The Pandemic Or I Watched The Madame Cj Walker Story & Found 1 Lie I Loved

SIAARA FREEMAN

brown sugar da secret til it caramelizes into song, the song will be

thick & sugary & burnt & dripping & it will coat your throat like syrup

it is medicine but you can't tell the children that or they won't swallow.

they gone be dizzy, become a bed of flower crowns, petal them

asleep & if they wake with thorns brew them into tea, steep them slow

& let it wake the others allow the drinkers to decide if it is bitter or not,

                         i know

women who are more lavender than anything else, pressed into

a book, a palm, a poem, a cure I figure Eucalyptus had a short life

as a girl quiet until she became useful a balm on the tongue of a woman

everything sweet aint candy & sometimes you just got  to pick something

up off the floor & put it in your mouth & acknowledge God made it

                       & it won’t hurt

Haint Green

i. A funny thing happened at my father’s funeral. His friend owed him

money & so he put it in the casket with him. My father was a capricorn.

The joke was he couldn’t rest. Or maybe the joke was he wouldn’t

Rest. Or maybe the joke was rest. Rest, lol, can you imagine?

Ii. What would you take with you if it turns out we can take something

to somewhere? A secret? A picture of your mother her eyes bright

with yesterday? An ice cream sandwich? A book of poems you have

to learn to love?

Iii. The punchline is unfinished business. No other way when one is

Murdered. In that church pew valium held me like a hero as I watched

the whole thing through the eyes everyone called his. A man walks into

heaven then suddenly remembers he left his spitting

image realizes he has her smile in his right hand, he

looks down (despite the warning). I knew he would

Iiii. Ever laugh so hard your eyes water down the ghosts?

v.   Ever ghost so hard you water down your eyes?

vi.  After the funeral I see him everywhere. Every time a man is shot

in the head. I see him between the couch cushions. At the end of a blunt.

In Jamaica  drinking a red stripe on a patch of glass. In a backyard drunk

with witches dancing to motown. Screaming from my mouth. In my lupus

diagnosis. Laying in the cracks of my knuckles.  Knock knock,

who’s there?

7.  What is dark humor? A woman snipping then discarding the bloom

from a rose, caressing the thorns and admiring what brings the blood?

A woman gets on stage, tells her story and decides the audience needs

to be more comfortable, she pretends her pain is relatable.  At night it is

not enough and coin sized patches appear on her scalp so she spends

hours in the mirror attending tiny funerals trying to laugh her face off.

Siaara Freeman is somewhere near a lake wanting justice for Breonna Taylor and talking to ghosts.