Imagist Poem

Salute the Ghetto Gates
By Marialexa Kavanaugh

Lighting exudes her mocking gaze,
Those mocha, liquid eyes,
Fusing with the dark,
She leans against the violent masculinity,
The burly monument,
Tribute to macho superiority that is her man,
Her lover,
Her babe.
The night is charcoal save for the lustrous and boasting scintillation of his piercings.
They slouch against the car,
Their spinal columns mutated to acrobatic formations,
chiseled against the crappy metal beast.
The same one they cruised around Espanola.
It now shimmies wildly,
A careless belly dancer,
Shimmying with the vibration form the rude belches of music,
Naked, blunt and brilliant rap.
The masculine perfume of his sweat,
Fluttering through her nostrils,
The sedative taste of youth,
Of never bowing down,
To kiss someone else’s hand.
For they style and protect the crown on their head.
Royalty of the dumpster,
The moldy armpit of the world,
With its streets freckled by the carcasses of beer bottles,
Of the wrappers that used to blanket and hug Wendy’s burgers.
Right now a cigarette lies sandwiched between the inflated brutes that are his lips,
A rivulet of smoke trickling through the greased and heavily slimed air,
Hate in the organization of smoke,
Into the already ill and sickly atmosphere.
She swaggers around,
Trying to amplify those articulated hips,
Hips clenched aggressively by
Delicious yet mischief triggering jeans.
He squints at her like she is a prowling gazelle and he is a hyena and he wants the layers of her flesh to be massacred and marred by the blades of his teeth,
Like she is his glorious prey and he would like to tear her, consume her.
Her eyes feast on him like he is a God,
An inexorable alpha male,
The bestseller, the masterpiece of the heavens.
And in the contradicting buckle of their eyes to one another,
The rest of their world, shrieks and howls
And whinnies and caterwauls.
Yet they own that town.