TWO POEMS // Z.T. CORLEY

Asexual Love Poem
after Diane Seuss

Can we meet somewhere outside of the erotic and the pornographic,

in a homeland of the mind, at a ramshackle gas station in South Carolina,

in the gap between James Baldwin’s teeth, under the dead tree in the backyard,

behind an abandoned cathedral, in a nation within a nation, at the mouth

of a river, on the border between the lands of the living and the dead,

in the prologue of an unfinished novel, in the throat of a wood thrush,

in a stranger’s house where we pose nude together for Deana Lawson,

beneath a cloud of blackbirds, under the influence of longing, in a black-

and-white short film where we both die in the end, in a country of feeling,

against the trunk of a pear tree, where the Devil refuses to beat his wife?

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What It’s Like to be a Black Girl in the South
after Patricia Smith

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It’s hunting for tadpoles
but being afraid of frogs. It’s waking early
and wearing white and praising the Lord
in the morning dark. It’s hotcombs
sizzling on the bathroom sink
and the possibility of being burned.
It’s being a grandma’s girl.
It’s bacon in the collard greens
and eating pig’s feet. It’s blowing away
the dandelion’s white afro
and always wishing for a puppy.
It’s being blue-black and nappy-headed
and happy to be alive. It’s South Carolina
as a way of seeing*. It’s the Old Testament God
and mamas who sleep all day.
It’s being your daddy’s afterthought.
It’s always being a little girl
standing outside your mama’s closed door,
even when you’re a grown woman.

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‍* This line is a riff on a statement British-Ghanian Lynette Yiadom-Boakye once made in an interview about her art: “Ghana is present as a way of seeing.”

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Z. T. Corley is an M.F.A. Candidate at Georgia College & State University. She is a reader for Callaloo and Sontag Mag, a recipient of the 2026 AWP Intro Journal Awards, and has been nominated for the Best New Poets Anthology. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Revolute, Callaloo, Kawandi Magazine, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a poetry collection.