The contractions Have come Too soon You are sentenced To bed in the country house During the tedious hours Your sons scrap Your husband courts An imaginary lover You summon the living Mothers: Hagar Of the bitter smile Sarah Whose laughter lies Rebecca Who outwits men…
The storm breaks leaving the limbs far away from being what happened, the world, like this. Wind still refuses to choose between the plumes of grasses and the roofs of the big houses. The agony of nails prying loose. The swing unhinged. The fleshy roots of an ash exposed like the paintings of Death embracing…
But since I’ve written just this one poem About being black, having a black body, I know that they have won—whoever they are. And I know what it is like to wish for death. Not the way people in poems do, But the way successful suicides do—or did.
A few sounds, over and again, grip me through this drunken mess. I walk to the oblivious road, gone and done for. A few beats of my pulse splinter through the plates of my skull. The gun blast, I do not know where the bullet hit or the depth of my wound. My…
after Stephen Hawking Jimmy Alvarez and Emilio Sanchez and his brother are absent forever, each shot in the head in the park, and so their membership has lapsed with the Latin Kings. Slumped in their car seats, they look as if they drank too much except that their lips are frosted white over pearl and…
for Norma Crowded cemeteries Everyone builds high into the sky trying to get closer to Jesus Empty wine bottles The church bells ringing calling todo el mundo to the evening rosary Poverty as revealed through the use of flowers and bright colors like a Mexican’s house yellow red pink blue scarlet purple You never seen…
Mama warned me, stay away from white girls. Once I didn’t. So, thirty years too late I’m minding my mama. That’s how it happened. I saw her. Flurries that night and she’s running, bare-legged, wearing almost nothing at all, and the snow’s rising up in funnels, like ghosts, spinning across the street till they whip…
i. Between the confluence of the rivers, the smolt twist and die in massive turbines. Liaison between the proliferation, Nusoox and all the commissions, Yowanswickt watches the roll of dice, pitched in bone games, about irrigation, treaty and young, vulnerable fish. Dialogues with usurpers who are loquacious and convinced of the real in terms of…
When they were still young and love was not yet their protection, he fell, though only once, into what he called another woman’s arms. But she understood him, and speaking the language of betrayal, she understood him to mean another woman’s legs, and it was this understanding she was trying to swallow. If I…
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