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Columnist:
Stacey Tolbert
Khadijah
Queen
Writer and artist Khadijah Queen was born near Detroit and raised in Southern California. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Poemmemoirstory, AUGHT and
New Ohio Review and is forthcoming in a women's military anthology due in September 2008 from Kore Press. Khadijah's debut poetry collection, Conduit, will be available in June 2008 from Black Goat, an imprint of Akashic Books. A Cave Canem Fellow, she holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Visit her website:
www.imagesound.tk.
THICK AS PINS
for the girls I grew up with
and the women we became
As kids I swear we lived for hair pins,
Bobby pins, sometimes we kept them
In our pockets.
We had little combs
And endlessly styled our hair,
Barbie's hair. Sometimes the pins ended
In strange configurations, semi-
Paper clips,
mini Barbie knives,
The rounded tips bitten off and made razors.
Sometimes Barbie got so mad at Ken
She'd have to cut him. Of course we didn't call them
By those names. Our Barbies were Mahogany, June Blackout,
Badass Grandma Cecil.
Now the withering games between us,
All but one a mother,
What we offer
Each other is more than comfort. We
Expect a wounding.
We marvel at the needle of love.
Armed with those pins,
We found plenty to do. It's not important
What we found:
We were gifted.
"Thick as Pins" appeared previously in Poetry Superhighway (July 2006).
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