Back to Issue Twenty-Three.

You’ll Never Love Me

BY LUE HUGHES

 

Sometimes I admire the way the scrimmage between crows
for scraps of carrion tossed to the dumpster sounds. It’s not something
I often hear these days. Nobody is to shame for that. Without shame, the ability
to foster guilt, am I still considered human? The drama
of thoughts like this breeds reasoning for forked legs
where I allow the hue of sex to smear. I could know better
than to sacrifice intelligence for pleasure.
Is that what makes art
so desirable? What makes the under-wine flesh tasteful? I should stop
listening to animals lose their mind for blood but my neighbors can’t stop
fucking so why pretend? A man explodes inside me a few times
a month and I wonder what my art hums like. You ever see that movie
where a group of crows dive-bomb a boy until he falls dead
in the field, he asks. A murder, I say. A group of crows is called a murder.

 

Lue Hughes (she/her) is the author of A Shiver in the Leaves (Boa Editions, 2022), listed as best books of 2022 in The New Yorker, and the chapbook, Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. She is the founder of Shade Literary Arts, an online platform for queer writers of color, cohosts The Poet Salon Podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat, and serves as the Poetry Editor for CHUM News. Her honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Rosenberg Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, Cascade PBS’s Black Arts Legacies honoree, and named Most Influential by Seattle Magazine. Her writing has been published in The Paris ReviewOrionAmerican Poetry ReviewSeattle Met, and others. She’s been featured in The Seattle TimesForbesWomenEssenceKUOW Public Radio, and more. Lue lives in Seattle, where she was born and raised.

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