Back to Issue Twenty-Three.

You’ll Never Love Me

BY LUTHER 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.

 

Luther Hughes is a Seattle native and author of Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is the Founder & Editor-in-Chief of the Shade Journal and Associate Poetry Editor for the Offing. A Cave Canem Fellow and Windy City Times 30 Under 30 Honoree, he has work published in or forthcoming from Columbia Poetry Review, Vinyl, BOAAT, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. Luther is currently an MFA candidate in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis. You can follow him on Twitter @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful.

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