☀ Today's Poem: "Theory of Plate Tectonics" Kemi Alabi

for Regina

She says New England hoards college girls like cherries in its cheek,
tongue-tying legs to knots, making party tricks out of people.
Says it's an old currency, wads of tangled stems tumored
with unfinished bows. Says the quick ones learn to curl like ribbon.
The brave ones learn to run with their hands. The pretty ones knot
and knot into rope and callus, none of their blood stays long.
But half butane, half lemon juice, all pit, no skin, us sad ones
are a new fruit. I tell her we should shower more. Eat something
besides black pepper and rum. I tell her the teapot's melted
to the stove, the mugs chipped in hazardous places—dropped
from scalded hands to blades, stealing lips from our guests.
She reminds me we have no guests here. Just the half-dead boys
we've specialized in trapping, leggy never-giants too grateful to run.
Cups brimming with sliced smirks, kitchen table littered with scabs,
we pick over the charred parts: matchheads sawed from stems
with his sharpest key (ours now); a still-warm collarbone (ours now);
the lightbulb he almost smashed into her throat when he learned
not all flightless soft-bodied girls are fireflies (ours to shatter
in the rooftop shadows just like one of us). She tells me Paris
is glitter and ash this time of year, red-velvet gloved and scowled.
Tells me Cape Town paves its streets with wings that shimmy
for stray coins. Says she's got a naked man waiting in Havana
and his neighbor owes her seven cigarettes. She's been studying
plate tectonics. Whispering spells for Pangaea. Lighting candles
for the Great Rift Valley with bootleg magma from Kilimanjaro.
Branding Himalayas to her calves' Appalachia. Speed testing
smoke signals hitched to waves. She asks me the difference
between arson and wildfire. I say arson is chain-smoking
with her Tinder wax doll collection. Wildfire is misusing matches
as daylight. Should have said the difference depends on what's burning.
Such old bones for such new people, more cinder than marrow.
We feel safe in all the wrong places, most at home in flames.