there is a wolf prowling
in the stalks outside a black woman’s
Twitter profile, gnawing at
the bark of unsheathed pencils
and waiting to leap
at an unsuspecting neck. moonlight
strikes the head of a rocket statue to trigger
the pack, they howl and scrape
at the spines of scary galleys
with names they gutturally mispronounce for fun
but the heroine of this story just
takes her first draft and rolls it up,
throws the dusk-to-dawn lights on
outside the house that knows itself
and swats some of the tykes on their noses
till they scatter. her neighbor puts up
a warning: the residents here ain’t the ones.
the next HOA meeting makes a fence of bodies,
gathers its own nets, immunizes its own from fatal ideas,
puts buckshot in the barrels of their fountain pens.
we will hear about another pack before day even breaks,
best believe, but even our kids will know, will put
pebbles in their slingshots as warning. they will
tell stories in the cafeteria about how their mothers
were good with the blades of pens,
how they learned how to hold one early,
how nobody could ever tell them nothing ‘bout who they were.
and one night, when harvest night calls for starving wolves,
those children will reach for their mother’s weapons,
and cast light like there is no night.