Orphaned, night goes around undoing everythingwe thought we’d built to outlast us. This slight starlight graffitis its nameup & down the schoolhouse wall. No Trespass means nothing to the bulletsthe wind carries from our hands, outward. Because ash is always plural, dawn doesn’t botherstacking the living together before burning.
Consider it for a second, she saidExisting at many intersectionswhere your existence is a wound.See it and know it for yourself. How is it that my existence is a wound?my blackness––my body and my flesh––isperceived as gangrene. necrotic.to be scraped off.to reveal a whiter skin.Living in the wake of slavery,for here, to be black means to be invisible.to be closest… Read more →
They say the blue spinal fluid of the horseshoe crab could holdthe cure for cancer. Imagine them, their spike tails strapped skyward, leaking not the ocean but its color. . .With the flatness of the ocean floor, this relative of the spider — this non web-spinning cousin—doesn’t know how to be inverted. Or bled. Exoskeletoned and the one eye reading… Read more →
If the age was opulence I am a walking cloak of memory smashing sveltein the fine line of fresh air unlonelied velvet sit with privilegein your honey throat gossip flinging afflictionof this generation how much can one name carry, oh — eternal legacies it was so much heavier than I thought it would be one snowflake at a time perhaps,… Read more →
for greatness that was his last mistakewe massed his grave the family in a slab without belief of afterlife in this lifeI despised his guardian angels his stunt crash resurrections his hearingwas blurry one sentence led into another bled into my mother’s ears one time shethrew a hot rag at him during recovery at home his ribs broken she was… Read more →
Outside the summer-dead cemetery, a crew chips the trimmed branches of pine. Some morningsit’s the fragrance of a cut lawn that make you breathe deeper. Others, the lawnmower’s two-stroke fumes. Today, despite the noise, you could think forest and be in deep shade, sap formingon cones overhead. The soft earth of needles seem to never decay but weave like a… Read more →
Wind peeled the sheetmetal lid off the house the way it sheared birchbark in silvered rolls, whittled, bent on diminishing—the warm cavities of the house lay open, gasping cold light & air. In each cell… Read more →
For May Sarton After the stroke, May’s fans broughther birdseed, in a fifty-pound bagshe couldn’t lift. The poet struggled to rise, to open the door of her home,saw the bag, then burst into tearsof frustration. The bag seemed to torment her,like the high-heeled slipperssomeone gave me after my stroke; like healthy people who told meat twenty-three and paralyzed,it could be… Read more →
Visiting the coast of the Gulf — it is humid,this I knew once & have kept, a dullstory I sometimes tell about a lost quarterof my life. You know how the past, like a trainthrough town mid-afternoon, misguideddespite its tracks, stops traffic, shears the undivided muddle into a neat impasse, each onlooker’s undividedattention face-forward, for once, squinting & humid& waiting… Read more →
I fall off. I fall off like a bus that won’t run on the ridge or stay in the lane. I’m drivingdown into the river as if there aren’t enough roads left. I fall out like jail, like I’m tired.Like I don’t want those clothes anyway, so it’s best to go commando till I can takeanother town. I no longer… Read more →