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When my grandfather turned ninety we had a party in a restaurant in Harlem called Copeland’s. Harlem restaurants are always dim to dark and this was no exception. Daddy would have gone downtown but Baba, as we called him, wanted to stay in the neighborhood, and this place was “swanky.” We picked him up in…

The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children.     Who are you, mister? One of the boys asks From the eternal back seat, And here is the one good thing: If I am alive, then so, briefly are they, Two boys returned, three and one, Quiet and scared, bunched…

Bird shit streaking down the backs of Adirondack chairs, a naked woman sketching. Is the point of art to know what hands will do? For a moment she looks up, then resumes.

So autumn comes to an end with these few wet sad stains Stuck to the landscape,                                        December dark Running its hands through the lank hair of late afternoon, Little tongues of the rain holding forth                                                                   under the eaves, Such wash, such watery words . . .   So autumn comes to this end,…

Tenderly she would take them down and fold the arms in and fold again where my back should go until she had made a small tight square of my chest, a knot of socks where my feet blossomed into toes, a stack of denim from the waist down, my panties strictly packed into the size…

The speaker is the young black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children.     A few nights ago A man swears he saw me pump gas With the children At a convenience store Like a punchline you get the next day, Or a kiss in a dream that returns while You’re in the middle…

But later, to teach myself humility I worked exclusively with breath, with the insubstantial, with what does not last, not leave a record behind those streamers, those ribbons we trail from our bodies banners, flags of the living excrement of the mouth and lungs, though we do not like to think that the spirit is…

Nothing is flat-lit and tabula rasaed in Charlottesville, Umbrian sackcloth,                                  stigmata and Stabat mater, A sleep and a death away, Night, and a sleep and a death away— Light’s frost-fired and Byzantine here,                                                                aureate, beehived, Falling in Heraclitean streams Through my neighbor’s maple trees. There’s nothing medieval and two-dimensional in our town, October…

A Mexican migrant worker was kept sedated in an Oregon mental hospital for two years because doctors couldn’t understand his Indian dialect. Hospital staffers ruled Adolfo Gonzales was mentally ill because “he couldn’t speak to us to tell us he wasn’t.” These are the words you did not have to tell them who you were,…