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

Lights on the dashboard spell out
“You still can’t kiss me”

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

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

Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.

you know that
baby swallows make silver ripples
in wild rivers to court reeds?

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

You said it was okay to blame
what goes wrong on the planet

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

The sin is existing.

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

We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…

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.

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

I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…

Should have found a job by now; should have slept in the night;
should have boiled old coffee before noon.