Mission » MumberMag

Diahann Carroll Takes a Bath at the Beverly Hills Hotel

This city remembered I was black and said “no”
years before it came cooing with cash in hand,
so let the water rise until it splashes the marble.
Let them send a white girl to mop my flood later.

Dragged

I’d never heard this quiet voice of her, this slow talking, this way of speaking which seemed to be attuned to an inside rhythm matchless in quietness and slowness, as if coming from beyond the walls of the house and the yard and the walls of all other houses and from beyond all Aron Awa and from beyond all the mountains

Riddle

He was like the town bike
everyone got a ride. He was like a ride
that made me vomit. He was like the vomit
I spewed in a Wendy’s parking lot.
He was like a parking lot I lay
down in and let the hail beat and bruise me.
He was like a bruise you discover but can’t
remember where it came from.
What did you smack into?
By now you know his hands
were threats. By now you know
his hands were switches. He was like
the switching breeze that smacked
the chimes against my house the morning
I found out he’d hung himself.

Roleplay

In the blue light of your bedroom
I could be anything: housewife
mending the shadows as they drape
the clothesline, ghost boy, music
pulled from the belly of the lake.

The Attic Doesn’t Lead to Antarctica

The problem with me, he says, is that my parallel is too nice, thereby making me too mean. Apparently it’s because I clamshell up even though we live a 10-minute walk from a pho place with the best Bun Bo Hue in Sunnyvale, because even pho can’t drag me out of this house, from under its short ceiling that feels closer to squashing me into the ground every morning, from the rails of the balcony overlooking the street where I can hear gunshots every several nights even though this area is supposed to be super gentrified, full of software engineers and their 4K monitors.