Poetry

Circa 1994

Circa 1994

♦
Fall 2020 ♦
after Jason Isbell’s “The Life You Choose” It wasn’t Jack and Coke, it was Southern Comfort in Taco Bell cups full with ice, no doubt on our way to another viewing of Pulp Fiction or to Hoover Reservoir to steam windows and dream of big cities and rock stars and riot…
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honey boy, honey boy

honey boy, honey boy

♦
Summer 2020 ♦
you’re a demigod, honey boy:             a refrain of affirmation though dulcet still             you’re just human learn not to rely on sight             because it’s only clear too late, looking back follow the scent…
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The Race Bone

The Race Bone

♦
Summer 2020 ♦
That old man proclaims, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” But where in the body does the race bone lie? Can we find it on an X-ray? Is it locked inside the spine? Does it make its home among the vertebral bones? Or is it hidden in…
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Orchard

Orchard

♦
Summer 2020 ♦
to the man who told me he was tired of hearing about Strange Fruit   watch them hang // blood oranges // ripened from the inside out // swollen from the intake of rain // juicy // best picked when dead // sliced from the tree // cut open //watch…
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Gone

Gone

♦
Spring 2021 ♦
It is the week after my eldest living aunt has, with us all in proximity, buried her sister. It is the second sister, out of nine siblings, she has buried. Her youngest brother, gone too. My Aunt Rosetta, of course, did not lift her eighty-five-year-old, tiny, weathered limbs toward a…
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At the Gate

♦
Fall 2019/Winter 2020 ♦
Say you are not watching people take off their shoes, put their belongings on  a conveyer, empty their pockets of change. Say you are wearing  an extravagant silk scarf, oversized sunglasses, a brilliant smile. No searches stand between you and the silver jet warming its engines at the gate. But…
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