Poetry

  • When I Was White

    When I was white I came and went, a cycle of blood and moon and tide, hid nothing of gun-shape inside me, debated evil   with no one. I said: Bring me something handsome to eat and they did, that steak butter, you could spread it on bread. I said: Bring   me taxis. They…

  • Ogoni

    Neighbors, please don’t     mind me this morning         at windows balling my fists   at the sun. Lowdown     bastards, imbeciles         & infidels, a tribunal   of jackasses behind     mirrored sunglasses         with satchels of loot—wait,   calm down, count to twenty     & take a few deep breaths.         You don’t…

  • Blue

    See my colors fall apart? Green to yellow with just one shade gone, the changing tints of your sun-struck eyes, if there were sun. Today the prism held to mine’s   a prison, locking in the light. In one of those mirrors the colors are true. In one of these pictures the pigment’s my own….

  • Letters

    “Dear Muzz,” I wrote, the summer I was ten from a seedy nature camp in the Poconos with cows and calves, huge geese, some half-wild ponies —heaven for the urban savage I was then— “I have to do this letter to get breakfast. Kiss Kerry for me. I milked a cow named Clover.” (Kerry, my…

  • Heartsong

    A bird sings from the tree. The birds sing sending waves of desire—and I stand on my roof waiting for a randomness to storm my days. I stand on my roof filled with the longing that sings its way out of the bird. And I am afraid that my call will break me, that the…

  • Becoming Kansas

    My friend says yes to this, yes to that,     Lies in bed all day saying answers, His life reduced each hour to this: water,       Paper-thin sheath of flesh, various cancers That he allows, even befriends.     Some of us will die of greedier   Diseases, some by their own skeletal hands.    …

  • Woman of Color

    The splendid coat that wrapped the favored son In fevered dreams of adulation And turned his brothers’ hearts from jealousy To rage (Behold, this dreamer comes)—though long Since rent and soaked in blood, dried and decomposed— Arrives through the long centuries over Sea and land, the unexpected birthright Of this particular girl. Its separate Magic…

  • Another Imaginary Voyage

    for X— When cabbalists declare Each deed we do affects Beings in other worlds, My thought turns round to sex,   As it inclines to do, As needle to true north, Considering our case, Weighing it back and forth.   What if we had undressed That chaste July, and what If we were being watched…

  • The Blue Castrato

    i. To His Savior in Christ If I did not, as I do, know well to love you first, I’d love my voice instead, cause you to yield the throne whose impossibly precious batting I could sing all day and never start to know—it is blasphemy or worse even to think it (Domine, me— ut…