Poetry

You have a gun but to use the bulletYou decide your wife, having snuggled itUnder her tongue, should then smuggle itInto your pie hole but she swallows it.You have a gun but to use the poisonYou have your son dip a rose in venomSo strong the smell alone will kill someone,But the first to die…

Maxine Waters, being of fire, being of swordShaped like a silver tongue. Cauldron, siren,Black as tarnation, black as the consciousnessOf a black president’s wife, black as his black tieTuxedo beside his black wife in room after roomOf whiteness. My grandmother’s name had waterIn it too, Water maker. I have wept listeningTo Aretha Franklin sing Precious…

“Carry on,” they say,Even if you carry nothingBut your own desolation,And how much does desolation weigh?It’s like an armload of sirens.When I walk through the meadow,When I walk down the mountain valleys,When I walk in beautyI try to remember who I am.Nothing doing.Out there in space, Einstein washes his hair.A thirsty wind drubs the open…

There are moments I smooth the crumpledfolds of my life and read them like a map.Travel all roads at once. I meet you again in a small townwe reach from opposite directions, a place where no one knows usyet we’re immediately known:two strangers. The map’s creases make as much sense, or as little,as the roads….

Think I don’t know nothing.Child.Stopped kissing me goodnightwhen she turned fourteen.Well.Every good thingturn to glass.Then break.She ratherstay away.Got my nose.Eyes, too.When she was little,they called her Lil Gail.Bet she don’t remember.She so busywriting things.Don’t tell your businessin front of Tameka.She will put it in a poem.She better notwrite nothingabout me.I rememberwhen I had her.Two and…

For the families of the deceased buried in Jewish Cemeteries desecratedsince January of 2017 They came with small rocksand pebbles to place on the holy groundwhere gravestones had been turned over and desecrated.They came with their relatives’ plot numbersscribbled on scraps of paper.They came with tears in their eyes,they came with their memories andgrief unfurling…

I watch the little weasel rise just partlyout of a cleft in earth, its facea periscope at sea, this way and that but not slow asan owl does it, the moon behind himin old children’s books, his giant tufted headturning full circle and rich with pause.Because the weasel isn’t patient. It’s all frenzy.Through weeds, another…

Almost two thousand years before Da Vinciimagined a machine whose screwlike overhead motor could lift the machine into vertical flight,children in China played with bamboo toys whose propellers, thin and light as dragonflywings, were set on a sharpened stick and spun into the wonder of an object spiraling in the air.The toys were brought back…

Taller than a manpitched from the earthgarbled needleblackened nowits volute screedbee- and beetle-riddenup and down betweenthe un-sprung buds, the wildefficient feel ofsmockedrabbit-skinnedexplosionspoised so slowlyon its undertakingthat it was so longbeing truethe cold and the craftlesswas not craftspotting the nichesthe leaves thexanthene core.