Two Poems
by Victoria Mbabazi
Overeasy
there’s a chance I won’t love you tomorrow I say this hoping the night sky will continue to border us but I also know a place we could get married so I could put my heart in your hands promising the blood won’t get all over your dress and I won’t love you tomorrow
though the sky has one star in it but usually it has no stars in it usually it’s covered in clouds or smoke and shooting planes or whatever BoB said but you won’t know me tomorrow and right now your eyes are the softest they’ve ever been coloured like beer glass
framed in tear stains wide anticipating our relief or we could be forever for a moment we could make promises just call them fever dreams in the morning over eggs and burnt coffee then when the hangover sets in I’ll notice the ring on my finger and swallow it so you can be lost if you’d like and I can belong still to you
My Gender is Whatever Song is Playing
It’s electric guitar with a solo that’s mostly distortion it’s being sad in major chords it’s the smell of the bar where the local bands play
it’s break ups in the summer time like I’m not a girl
and I don’t wear much red but I have been known to fall in love every October I identify as bright loud colours like a hot pink
a brash green a neon orange like a migraine inducing colour I’m a pride flag
a belle in a ballgown with hairy pits and a quaffed beard and I’m gay like real gay like I’d give it all up for a caffeine addicted business femme who buys me flowers
when she forgets to call gay or a masc who loves their dogs and organic vegetables and wants to marry me in a cottage town gay
like writing poems about girls I see in passing like a love story in passing and I know
I’ve turned the girl you knew into a two minute bop with one verse and a chorus but there was never a girl just a poet just a dyke
Victoria Mbabazi is an MFA candidate with a concentration in poetry at NYU. Her work can be found in The Puritan, CV2, Feels Zine, Bywords, Untethered Magazine, Grain, and Release Any Words Stuck Inside You Volume 2. Her poetry placed second in The Hart House Review contest and her work has been shortlisted in Plenitude’s Flash Fiction contest and long-listed in Room’s Poetry contest. Her first chapbook “chapbook” came out with Anstruther Press this January.
