stars too
From the chapbook *Poems of Color*
“stars too / are ‘black bodies.’”
- Kei Miller, “viii.”
i am imploring you to treat my black body – all this
unfurled brown skin and fat – like you treat
the sun itself.
you lie underneath,
hoping to gather drops of its warmth so that your skin
starts to brown like mine. let the rays bestow you with a gift
of gold, allow yourself to shimmer in the sunlight. i am imploring you
to see
beauty gleaming through the darkening scars on darker
flesh, i am imploring you to fight
the light pollution that clogs up the sky and
chokes out the bright, glowing stars. i am imploring you to
love this tender, precious
star.
Willow Page Delp is a Jamaican-American student, writer, reader, book reviewer and feminist buzzkill. Their work has been published by The Lilac, The Indicator, News Decoder, and All Existing Literary Magazine. They can be found on Instagram at @wxddo.
Get Poems of Color as a physical chapbook or eBook from JAKE.
