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.
Tag: new poetry
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
When I go to sleep I do not see monsters, it is your slight figure,
the windows are open and you give it to me easy with sugar and
I still don’t know what too much of a good thing can do, sugar
leave the drapes open—those moonlines have kept me up for fortnights,
I whisk myself away, and
appetite follows. My stomach growls
when it’s horny–I mean hungry.
One of my favorite albums is
Sex and Food by Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
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.
How could I have accepted someone so flawed.
I ask myself this with the understanding that it didn’t start the way it ended.
Like he, I found myself to be a misnomer to life, and young, believed in the sprightly truths
of turning 28 when he was turning 39. I loved his age and the wisdom I thought came with it.
I didn’t see the drink clearly. And when I did he didn’t like it.
And because I did, I tried to unsee it. I wanted a family, for better or worse.
But the weaponry was above my pay grade. The psychologies
darning needles were cultish ideologies: no vaccinations hissed mother
and daughter, after that they snarked with supremacy about not trusting
higher education, common sense, conspiracies,
and griped when I suggested that humility is a virtue.
(Today, their perspectives would have been seen as QAnon material.)
Ultimately, the crime was that they deeded themselves better:
Two high priestesses of the crestfallen dynasty, always on display
with pride-smiles across placid irretrievable shapes.
I was grateful and beleaguered by the time they changed their minds.
But only after they used me like a bank, as did he.
And he bought all this drink. All these pills. All this technology and software.
All these clothes. How could I not see what bestowed
our scudded ground? But it’s because I’ve experienced
the sanctimonious self-regard too many times to count.
It was true the misogynies she charged
and there was vanity of equal stature:
there it is flapped in books and in mirrors and its salacious anger slaps all faces—
but it’s due to the insults her father spatted: words snaked into our lives.
That flew out of his mouth when I tried to hold them back,
but drunk on scotch and his scrimmage of self-loathing he scuffled
them to her and she recoiled into fractured mutations.
I understood because I was sunken into my own.
In the end, I believe nobody meant very much to each other.
It was evident in the way all the alienation was set up to
anchor her to one side. So he burned it down, and I tried to tack it
back up with fabricated sticks. He was an angry spirit set up to lose.
And I was in everyone’s way but I thought I wasn’t.
My new therapist instructs me to let go,
as did my old therapist who knew us all.
They say this is a re-wounding: to have never been really heard
To be treated like I hurt them both when, if they understood,
their pain led me along with its broken rope of magical thinking.
I have thought now our family is no longer real.
The blinds are thick horizontal shutters that keep me in my place.
Now we are all in this plague and acrimony bleeds from the government
portal. My forehand and all this historic paramountcy make me rage
but I am almost done with it now. The past is a record, a parting, a settlement.
I hope to stay away from people who are malleable and whose ideologies
rest in those superficialities that skim addiction and its uniting vanities.
My mornings in this living room
are writing verses while he sleeps
a little longer. He is a sparkling clear beacon
even through chemotherapy,
even as he grows slightly transparent.
He is still strong enough to guide us.My mornings in this living room
are writing verses while he sleeps
a little longer. He is a sparkling clear beacon
even through chemotherapy,
even as he grows slightly transparent.
He is still strong enough to guide us.
I remember nothing about that day
but what I do remember is that little was said
I mean you said very little
& I heard much of what you said