POETRY

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
—Rita Dove
Babylon

If America is Babylon / and you are an exile / newly arrived among pagans / Catholic, ‘Ngolan, Black, woman / you already know how to pray

I Garden at the Edge of Autumn

There is so little left of the tomato plants.

On the Night Row-Houses Across the Street Catch Fire

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

Vase

The storm passes without snow.
The car waits loyally in the back lot.

Despairathon

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

Poem in Collaboration with a Broken iPhone

I’msorry I‘ll see what happens iLife

Clotheslines

Ma wrings
a wet world
of colors

My Multiverses

It is the 70s. 1970s? 2570s? Who knows?
Audre and I have a penthouse in New York.

Landscape with Ash

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.

Time Travel

I count my homes—
those of my scattered youth
the sanctuary of our young family
the intermittent rest stops
of apartments and vacations.

An Endeavor of Being Now

We stop doing dishes while
a mile unwinds
from the tree outside.

[Zoetrope with Particulates in it and a Newborn]

and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud

Finding My Fix

I slumped in front of a massive desk, a passive patient corroded with failure and dread.

beach
On Undressing a Color / On Undressing a Girl

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.

robertson quay

how does an afternoon turn
on its axis?

Condolences

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

Observer of the Patient

Her brown eyes,
how a fig
considers itself.

The River

I myself should never have been born

Mom, in Her Dementia, Steals Oranges

and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place

Getting Postcards From a Piano Showroom

The two of us toast to a man we both love, to whatever degree, clink our glasses and laugh…