Cake

   ~ For Chris Brown

Rape doesn’t happen to men
Not even boys if you know how
To spin your tale & feather it up
You’re from that special, faraway place
It’s different in the country
Just couldn’t say no to it
Kind of, like, hot to trot
Like you’re always on top
Of monstrous mounds of flesh
Eating away at the insides of
The pinkest part of you turned red
Rubbed long enough so that then
& only then you can be a beast at it
You can be the best at it
You cannot tell a soul
Must lie still     be quiet
Just take it like the man
You always wanted inside
You know you cannot live
Without it     the tale
Of all that steatopygia
Stroking your egos
Whose is it now     who’s to blame
This burning     this desire to lie
About how the hunger became
A mirror you hate

Author’s Note: The italicized lines are direct quotations from Chris Brown’s interview with Decca Aitkenhead, published October 4, 2013, in The Guardian, in which he disclosed that by age 8, he was a porn aficionado and had had sex with someone he described as a girl aged 14 or 15, in his rural Southern hometown of Tappahannock, Virginia.

Originally published in Prime (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014)

L. Lamar Wilson is the author of Sacrilegion (2013)—the 2012 selection for the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, a 2013 Independent Publishers Group bronze medalist, and a 2013 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry finalist—and co-author of Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), with the Phantastique Five. Individual poems and scholarly essays have appeared in African American Review, Black Gay Genius (2014), Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, jubilat, Muzzle, Rattle, The 100 Best African American Poems (2010), Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (2015), Vinyl, and elsewhere. The poem from which Sacrilegion’s title emerged, “Resurrection Sunday,” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Wilson, a Cave Canem and Callaloo graduate fellow, holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and is completing a doctorate in African American and multiethnic American poetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. | Click here for CV

This piece was reprinted by EmpathyEducates with permission or license. We sincerely thank the Author, Poet L. Lamar Wilson for his kindness, vision, sensitivity and enduring spirit. We are grateful for the thoughts and feelings expressed, and believe this reflection invites an empathetic discussion.