June, I don't have to use magic burned into roots of antelope words to tell you what I mean, when I say I met myself in the Egyptian Room just a few days before my thirty-sixth birthday. It wasn't vertigo, though vertigo is common in the bowels of the concrete monster. Crossing Fifth Avenue was…
Blue Sea, black, in the hotel room He paces up and down and at The door the waiter is knocking: A glass of water, there you are, sir. How my head is pounding From my head Behind the wall the old thunder groans. He roars so loud that no sound comes. The lily sleeps behind…
It stands like a resentment. The mind's city unfolded to a huge, discordant image. Recollection closes in on the ancient buildings, the fractured curbs, and in all the places you might have known, women walk in the opposite direction. Onward to their first novel, the fictional release. I look through a great eye, seeing more…
“Here I was begging the Muse not to get me in troble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those ‘filthy’ words, all those scandalous, scabrous lines, pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon, like Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan…
Like through a telescope Planted in a fresh grave, I see through your nostrils, Darkly, the more distant past. Stubborn your horse skull That knows of the price on its head. Like a plate empty for days We stretch our hands out of the frame. A bloody yoke swims through The egg white of the…
When I am positive that nobody loves me, I despise all musical instruments. I can't endure vacuum cleaner attachments. I hate Yeats, my mother, and all the attention Jesus got. I avoid, perhaps hate, great black people. When nobody loves me, I am positive of it. I devise an impossible Fahrenheit. A heat that could…
Because I was empty my body got me a child, the small idea of a child— some pearly cells and light. I thought of it all night. It still lacked hands or a face with which to fill its hands, or another, lovelier face to fill its heart. Because I tend to take myself apart,…
Entering, I step up into a foyer of tea-chairs and brochures engraved with solemn questions. My friend lies in a far chapel under some candles and bas-reliefs, looking wind-flushed in a half-open casket and black suit, like he's playing dead but healthier than in years. Seeing him hits me like a slap and I actually…
As I recall, it was night in another country. Bare-chested men were shattering windows, inviting in some slight breeze. Small antiquated fans rattled, making silence an exotic and far-away resort. I was a young girl. I closed my eyes. I slid the back of my hand across my cheek. It seemed someone else's wrist. She…
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