POETRY
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
He has stories that I am not in
anymore. It’s healed this way.
Empty vessels
make the most sound, I think,
as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.
I would always rather be happy than
dignified. Rather held than held
in awe.
Millions of Americans have been affected by identity theft. It’s probably the greenhouse gases.
you know that
baby swallows make silver ripples
in wild rivers to court reeds?
Try not to see your own predicament in every fucking thing.
we drove on through
the blue seal of morning as the turbines
turned and winked out their hearts
If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray
and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place
it’s touch-and-go with me and weddings
The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh…
We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…
I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…
Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.
I imagine that undressing a color, though, would be so much like peeling a memory away from the grey and the white matter of your brain.