I don’t know why I joined the white sorority.We whispered Latin passwords to each other.They wore white robes and sang to us. I don’t know where I belong.And the parties, like “Pimps and Hoes”inside a rented Laundromat with fake hickies and scars on our skin and pimp juicein pimp cups. Look at me: the only…
After he died, the mirrorsreflected everything. The half-face of his friend walking toward the door, his wife’s back, his sister’shands. I was there too, suspended somewhere in glass, briefly, indirectly— What part of me witnessedmyself newly without my father? I tried not to look. Cover the mirrors— Forget yourself to remember the dead.Someone show me how to divide…
I keep a few loose threads from each membraneand loop them through a needle to sew an Xon the sleeve of your favorite black sweater. Later, we make love and you complainmy fingers burn your body. I rub my eyeswith one hand and reach for your inner ear to burn us both from the inside….
1. A marriage is a contract to be strandedon an island with one other person who retains the option to sometimesnot even talk to you. And when sometimes is all the times, it feels like you are the last twoIndians, or Browns, left on the planet, and it’s Splitsville in Cleveland. Thirty-fivewhen we left each…
Logic—my father’s logic diedJune 24, 2009, in bright daylight.Murdered in the afternoon. Ihung up Missing Person postersof myself and listened for thesound of a tree falling. Thesound of the wind through treesis called psithurism. There’s noword for the translator of wind.If the wind is words, the trees areexclamation points. The spears ofmoonlight, question marks. Myfather doesn’t realize his wordsalways end in prepositions. I havea problem with [the moon], thereis a problem between [the moonand me], the problem is on [themoon]. What if he can no longerfind what is being modified, inthe way snow…
For the band of panicked street cats lapping spoiled soup I’d discarded at the base of what I only knew to call a Mexican rose, and for you, of course, dawdling on the lawn, bent over a Walmart telescope, in search ofstars that are remotest—Andromeda’s cities, the vaporous shimmering that was the first star of Ophiuchus, which even by then was gone,…
Civility—died on June 24, 2009, atthe age of 68. Murdered by a strokewhose paintings were recentlyfeatured in a museum, two whitesquare canvases, black scissors inthe middle of each, open, pointingat each other. After my father’sstroke, my mother no longerspoke in full sentences. Fragmentsof codfish, the language of savages,each syllable a mechanical dartfrom her mouth. Maybe this iswhat happens when languagefails, a last breath inward but nobreath outward. A state of holdingone’s breath forever but not dying.When her lungs began theirfailing, she …
I have been living despite myselfmy territory hemmed by mud and threatof mud If there is a land without its ownsubliminal violences this night offers nodefense of what has died in it Some thingsare only nourished in a stutter of kudzuand the inconsistencies of silver the moonshucks off Casual machines honey the darkwith the monotony of their health…
I’m enthralled by a cartoon’s coercion. Behind me, seen in the television’s reflection—exaggerated colors, animations—children whisperingbeside the slumbered old menthat gravel-in-teeth language: fuck, shit. I still yearn for youth, to imagine algorithms of birds,waddling outside on the lawn, the boys chasingfeathers, and the girls braiding a mother’s dahliain a beast’s night-black wings. Ah!—there’s the dawn-touch…
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