FOR YOU

blessed your lips manna, your touch silk, tell why I should not shout this divine, tell me what heaven will deny this. feed me, for if this desire was given to me I must satisfy it. for if it were not blessed, it would not be in my heart to want you. milk and honey, land of canaan, seeking a home in these rainforest walls tomorrow we can swim the length of the Essequibo and call it ours, kings will battle us for it, but it knows us and claims us. for this, wild like those waters, pure like those acres, is not to be shunned.

WANT

fat is the fruit of your failure.
shining red, hanging, weighty thing
it lingers outside the bedroom window,
root around the tailored space of ringed
remembrance. nurtured thing, horrid thing
a binding lead to your ankle, sinking you
into hardwood – the bottom of a black sea
rushing into the brown kingston shores; drown
beneath your frothing desire to want more. this
was your sin. your want your sin. your desire your
fault. after all, when have you ever gotten what you wanted?

SONG OF SONGS

does he read psalms and seek
to compare your form to a palm,
water-filled fruit, scattered shade,
slender perfection. does he see the
perfect stretching branch from awara arch,
and think it too steep a sojourn?
if you are not worthy of bruise,
love is not worthy of sweetness.

*awara: tropical spindly palm which is impossible to climb.

Makeda K. Braithwaite is a Guyanese writer. She serves as an editor at a university press and as a Submissions Editor for Uncanny Magazine. Her work has appeared in Fiyah Literary Magazine, blueii magazine, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and anthologies from Brigids Gate Press and MVmedia, with upcoming in Eunoia Review and Dirty Magick Magazine. Makeda won third prize in best fiction for the 2022 Guyana Prize for Literature Awards for her manuscript, An Anthology of Shivers. Her chapbook Go Fish: Go in De Pack (Bamboo Talk Press: 2024).