the louderARTS Project

Samiya A. Bashir

Samiya A. Bashir is the editor of BEST BLACK WOMEN'S EROTICA 2 and co-editor of ROLE CALL: A GENERATIONAL ANTHOLOGY OF SOCIAL & POLITICAL BLACK LITERATURE & ART. She is the author of four chapbook poetry collections: Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring, American Visa, Teasing Crow & Other Haiku and Gone Courting. Her poetry, articles, essays and editorial work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Curve Magazine, Black Issues Book Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Seventeen, Vibe, XXL, The American Journal of Public Health, Obsidian III, Cave Canem VI, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Lambda Book Report, NiaOnline.com, The San Francisco Guardian, Best Lesbian Erotica 2003 and in numerous other anthologies, magazines and journals. Bashir is a founding organizer of 2002's historic Fire & Ink: Writers Festival for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Writers of African Descent which has grown into a national writer's community. A fellow with the Cave Canem: African-American Poetry Workshop/Retreat, Bashir has won numerous awards for her poetry including the Astraea Foundation's Lesbian Writers Fund 2002 Poetry Award. She teaches creative writing to adults and children and has read her work at events and festivals around the country and abroad.





Mustang Sally

rode her steed
best she knew how

side saddle
backwards
breach

more often though
than not
she was ridden

hard steady swift
like December morning
breaths--in and

out of the lungs--pushed
into low hanging
frost bitten skies

steam ordered into
water lockstepped
into ice hydro-

planing in plain
view of everyone
she knew

when Sally rode
she broke barriers
of sound, branch and

twig, murder and that
place, that place that
hovers just before murder

Sally held herself tighter
than a tumbler of gin, drove
whatever she rode like

there was no
tomorrow hoped
that there wasn't

and when Sally tore through
town like her virgin dressing
gown the folk just shook

their heads side to side, sucked
their teeth, whispered poo-pooery
none too silently

never once warning her
to slow down.



© Samiya Bashir



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