You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.
Live the rest of your life from one worst case to another.
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
The collective failure of ethical standards
Her brown eyes, how a fig considers itself.
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
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…
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.