Making a Home

Making a home

I use the erotic while Audrey Lorde’s fingers write across my back,

letting me feel the words of black women coming home to roost,

to howl, to nurse our wounds, like being made animals,

analogies of our bodies agonizing within us.

She is breaking me free, liberating my skin as

black and worthy full well rounded and beautiful.

I use the erotic like words and blackness and power.

I kiss loud and proud. I get naked like a natural woman.

The House of the rising sun is in my thighs.

I make love to all the otherness,

welcoming home.