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We were excited at the motel when the B.B. King tour bus pulled in but then my mother said “Where did all these colored come from?” She’s eighty-five. That’s how it is in Ohio. No it’s not, that’s how it is in us, that’s why thirty-five years ago in my first year at Cornell we…

Filled with old lovers, in the clutch of the chair, you are a bloom of uncombed hair. With a collection of roses, bowls of mashed petals, I make a clear cup of sky. Fold away clouds. Roll up blankets of blue. I am a body of empty husks. Indian corn is in your hair, the…

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…