Poetry

Teach me to look in your eyes:

close or wide set. Cold sweat.

A duet. Now do it: all I feel

is tension: the peripheral view:

gravity: veiled exhales: my abdominal

cavity. I used to: avert my eyes

when someone noticed me. Now

it’s long skirts: printed shirts: watch me

be an extrovert: never inert: a subtle flirt:

the hurt: of this aloneness. Eyes pass:

through concrete glass: only if you

can meet them: desperate and desirous.

Inside us: a searching for something:

A little girl holds my heart with both hands

runs through veins, arteries, jumping cell to cell hopscotch

she loves big stuffed panda bears and drawing

big pink hearts with thick markers all over my teeth

she stays inside on rainy days, when her tiny ears catch the sound

of big bass outside voices she curls up in the hidden

chasms of my lungs but on occasion she will

climb up out my ribs to peak her head

through my eyes and she will love to trace her fingers

It is not only to follow or imitate

the tradition of our elders of yesterday

these hands

like those that came before us

reach the pure ether

where gods live

where I live

catching every fruitful tear

as if the answer to me

as if I’ll find the We

within those fragile beads

crashing into adorned fingers

the fingers trace our memories            

recalling

the index

the middle

Act One

You love riding 

with the windows down.

I hated it.

But then I rode 

with them down 

without you,

and I understood.

Coming back from a place you once had said 

was the “scenic route.”

Now it’s really more my route than yours: 

does that make you mad?

I drove an extra twenty miles

just to take that exit you took me on

when there was a crash on the highway

to see if I would cry when my wheels came to a stop 

at the stop sign.

I hate having to stop.

It’s hard
To not see the bad,
To not try and tune it out.
To smile and commemorate momentous occasions
On land others were brutalized on.

The approach, I had been told
Was to tune it out.
Pretend nothing had happened.
That worked well for the boys in my politics discussions.
Not for me.

You cannot tune out the brutalization of the enslaved peoples,
Peoples that built The Lawn.
That built Jefferson’s University.

Nacho table, extension cords, a locket
lost in the couch. This house crept up
on me like a new year: it was judiciously
January when one day I woke up
to December frosting hello on my window.
When I moved in, after a summer spent inert,
the floor was covered in dead crickets and dirt.
Now there’s unpaid parking tickets, fostered pups,
half-melted candles on the window sill. In this house,
I never want to be on my own, or still.
When the second-floor bathroom leaked

Even though see saws are a thing of the past,
I’ll return to a warm June evening when
my brother and I have walked
to the local elementary school.

We seat ourselves on opposite ends,
hold onto the metal handles
and rise and descend, one in the air,
the other on the ground, small craters where

other children have done the same with their feet.
We pull out tangerines we’ve stashed in our
windbreakers, peel them in unison,
one of us suspending the other, trusting a smooth descent.

Nestled books 

and nested damp hair. 

Warm bread and blood-

bloodied

Bloodied bird striking bars; ceramic skull cracked open.

You could’ve held it between two fingers, that small stony thing.

Those steely feathers now matted

your voice buried in static;

pounded piece of clay, caged squarely in chest, 

a terracotta truth- 

that bird, your voice, this earthly woman,

suddenly in  unison: 

We were here

We were here

We were here

Cher Ami

For heaven’s sake, they used your home against you.

They call it magnetoreception. 

Magnets make it better.

They called you a man, and it made it okay. 

You lost your leg, eye, and chest,

And then they stuffed you. 

I want to see you, but I also I don’t.

I’m sorry they stuffed you. 

Observations at the Hospital

You wear flip-flops as your father dies.

I hear you flop down the halls

as I relieve you to go watch.

It is in this moment, however,

i think back to when i was little

the freedom to do as i please

now that i’m here what shall i do

reminisce on the past

or stay in the present

why does the present bring such ...

is it my sense of clarity

the memories fading until 

now i must create new ones

with more subjects

but why

why can i not stay in my place 

with family

people hurt too much

there’s so much

pain

but then they make me laugh

make me smile

and i think

what if