KB Brookins

cantfindit

KB Brookins is from Stop Six, Fort Worth, Texas. They are a Black queer nonbinary poet, educator, organizer, and lover of most plants/people. They want to be your friend as well as your reminder to think in abundance. They have words published in Cincinnati Review, The Offing, ANMLY, and other equally pretty places. Their chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) won the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize. It was written with support from workshops with Lambda Literary, In Surreal Life, The Watering Hole, The Hurston/Wright Foundation, The Speakeasy Project, and Winter Tangerine. They are currently a PEN America Emerging Writers fellow and an African American Leadership Institute - Austin fellow. They’ve founded and led many initiatives such as Interfaces and Embrace Austin but currently are a student in the University of Texas at Austin’s Masters in Social Work program. Follow them on twitter or instagram at @earthtokb and access their exclusive teaching, writing, and zine content on patreon. They run a newsletter called Out of This World. They live in Austin, TX where they are writing books and trying their best. Source

Spondylolisthesis, or why I eat Taco Bell

I grab a #7 when I am my most depressed. Like today,

scarfing down a Crunchwrap Supreme to drown out

 

the dagger & twist from my lower back. Like when

the Baja Blast drowned out the Black boi asking

 

for anger to save them in my throat; my back hurts

in a country who wants to disable me. What feels

 

better than a hard-shell medicine, a lover (read: stranger)

asking if you need anything else. so I stuff my sadness

 

with hot sauce packets. My gifts come wrapped

in hexagons, too sexy for my pain. Weary needs

 

saving as much as it needs flavor & a country not bent

on Black suffering. What is your after-appointment fix?

Mine costs $7.22. Mine is fractures with enough

decency to come packed with straws and napkins.

 

What does your healing cost?

Published:

2022

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Food

Health & Illness

Mental Health

Racial Injustice

Literary Devices:

Allusion

an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference

Extended Metaphor

a metaphor that extends through several lines or even an entire poem

Rhetorical Question

a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered