Even from this distance I could go out
the door it would bang shut and crumble

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

He has stories that I am not in
anymore. It’s healed this way.

Okay, picture this: We’re in an elevator. The elevator shuts down. It doesn’t matter where we’re going, only that we’re alone.

Even as the sun warms the concrete
the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.

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

Try not to see your own predicament in every fucking thing.

I tap at the alphabet while a single deer
taps at the dirt beyond the brush
on the far side of the tree line.

love is a soggy tea stain on a grocery receipt

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

Gravel-scatted hell &
we were blessed to be able
to hold on for even a heartbeat

my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight,
and there are already way too many fragments in this house

Now that the Israeli has left, it falls
on me to make the salad.

my father holds
his favorite drink

the strands of your hair on the bathroom tiles aren’t sketching defeat. that’s you spitting disease in the face with another day you’ve woken up to.

Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time

we drove on through
the blue seal of morning as the turbines
turned and winked out their hearts

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