Where needles test the body’s currents. Without reason many degrees colder. A curtain pulled to barely block— no part hidden now, the holding organ a nest. Closer to bowl, bones curved to carry. Impulse like a lung expanding. Far away a promise of cloud against anything blue. The ocean knocks on a door at the bottom.
After Mahmoud Darwish our names will not dissipate : we will become air your lungs turn you breathless churn you to produce a feral pulp : activate our water spirits whiteness reckoned we create a Final Passage : our future
Spring is a brave knot of daffodils and one flowering cherry in a parking lot where I watch patients make their way across the pavement in a cold splatter of rain, gait careful as a cup too full, caregiver gentle at the elbow. But you, my son, are like vapor when you appear at the glass doors, black hood drawn… Read more →
The mythology of our autumn minds, scatter-shot and red-leafy and uplifted, we rely on the black roots winding and stretching from our windows that remind us when leaves should shudder, tumble, tell. We rely so much on every single face but ours. So many smatterings of colors. * I care so much for you. You are a sliver of moon/pie,… Read more →
That comes from a 14th-century poem too long for me to care to read just yet. If I’m going to read a long poem, it better be something translated from Greek, not a tongue like mine, albeit much different than my tongue. Besides, bird shoe really comes from a Greek philosopher who called it character instead of what I misheard… Read more →
A bird once gave me a list of ancient bird songs, a list of songs written in birdsong deemed to be among the greater songs, the classic bird songs. It was a day of curious longing. Winged things cannot be translated. No matter how one tries, the translation will be wrong. But my new friend did not seem to mind… Read more →
Of the fish in the Pine Bluff mall. Of being fishbowled in the skylit octagon of a rubber pond, the soft give of the lily pads beneath his hands and feet, the polished echo of a hollow log. Most of all he remembers the cool, dappled surface of the fish’s mouth against his palms, the quiet inside the body. There… Read more →
Scallops swung back and forth on the eelgrass, up sprouting from the sand of the ocean floor. Theyclumpedtogether, cozy and clinging to the blades. We felt bad each time We plucked one from its home. We imagined that some of these scallops could have been lovers cuddling up in bed together, or friends s t a r g a z… Read more →
This story is not what it seems. This story is less about men glistening in darkness than a winter followed by another winter. To be in the snow is to know the hunger for bitter fruit, the burn of bourbon going down. When Lot went outside his house he was searching for meaning, for something that dazzled. A satchel of… Read more →
1. when crime is embroidered on your skin at birth one must take precaution: say ‘I love you’ each time you step out because stepping in again isn’t a basic human right. shame, shame sometimes simple fixes cost more than one Black man’s life – the mechanics of this baffle… still 2. my uncle pulled into the driveway strobing red… Read more →