[481 words]
After Devil in a Blue Dress
1
Men love women with French accents.
Call me Daphne, a borrowed name
Stitched in silk. White beauty is currency
Spent by those with power.
Call me Ruby, soft as dusk, Southern accent
Sharp as a straight razor’s glint. Black as jazz.
One drop bleeds from brass throats.
I drift through doors with an amethyst talisman,
A shadow wrapped in mink,
Lined with smoke and want.
Lies are a tongue of which I’m fluent
—truth is a ghost that rattles and screams.
I ain’t your angel, ain’t your villain,
But a woman with a gun in her purse
And a past sutured in cotton and blood.
Love is a dirty game
I play to win. But every kiss
A nondisclosure contract
I never meant to sign.
2
Sister,
They made you a woman of smoke,
A chimera, a face remembered.
But never as Daphne in white disguise
Or Ruby in Black guise.
I see the fire you swallow whole,
A naked girl buried in lace and lies.
The untamed heart is like fresh tinder.
They taught you duplicitous games—
Play it quiet,
Play it soft,
Play it safe.
That slipping between shadows
Makes you whole.
That you could trade yourself
And still, belong to yourself.
But a love that costs your name
It is counterfeit,
The pistol’s empty, money’s spent,
like cryptocurrency.
They told you survival is silence,
And a man whose wishes you obey.
That freedom is a dress you borrow
That passing as white is power.
In high-rise hotels and backroom bars
L.A. smells of gasoline and cheap wine.
Who told you the night could keep you safe
In darkness where sheeted fools ride as ghosts?
Sister,
To the man who calls you a mystery,
Who drinks you down like Cuban rum,
Who will never know your name,
And dumps bodies under a neon glow.
Men in suits press too close.
But love—the kind that does not break,
The kind that does not take—
Waits for you like a silent soldier.
Not in the midnight shadows.
Not in a lie. Not in the hands
Of men who want but do not love—
Men taught by broken fathers.
The ones who could, who would
Love you unmasked, you have been
Told to fear them, to despise
And go nowhere near them.
Sister,
Do you think you can outrun fate?
Somewhere in the cracks of this city,
There’s a place where you can breathe.
Where no one tries to shape you
Into their dream, where the past
Does not slink in like a cat
Hair raised and claws bared.
Choose yourself.
Choose between the woman
They think they see, and the woman
She knows she is.
The streetlights paint her in silver,
But she is not theirs to claim.
Choose yourself. 
Now.
Before the night swallows
The whole of what is left of you.
Ron L. Dowell wrote Watts UpRise, a poetry collection released by World Stage Press in 2022. A very public love letter to Watts, Los Angeles, the collection honors its most notable artistic landmark, the Watts Towers, and its creator, Sabato Rodia. Watts UpRise is a finalist for the 2022 Press 53 Award for Poetry, and a featured poem, “Compton, An Energy-Fueled Dark Star,” was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. Ron’s poetry resides in Penumbra, Writers Resist, Oyster Rivers Pages, North Dakota Quarterly, The Wax Paper, Kallisto Gaia Press, The Penmen Review, Packingtown Review-Journal, and The Poeming Pigeon.
