Poetry |
“Prayer” and “Community Garden”
“It is a prayer of only-pleading and not only for the dear women who loved me, / but it must attend to the mess of the world …”
Poetry |
from “The School of Clara Ward”
“God give momma eleven, then took all but three. / My days is less than all the cents in this money. / My church is third in line. After family. And me.”
Poetry |
“Swatch,” “Mozart’s Colandar” and “tree”
“Not the haze of loss / when light dims today, / only rotation, / a different stance towards the sun.”
Poetry |
“The Neutral Ones,” “Mom Turns 79 During the Global Pandemic” & “Shut Up Amy Cooper”
“… that strange morning years ago I woke up / out of time into a middle space // between dreaming and perception / and for a flash was no one, just me // without a body …”
Poetry |
“My God is Oath, My God is Abundance / Full of Grace / Ghost (Spectre)“
“To call a people “black” is to say they can be from anywhere or nowhere. / To call a people “american” is to say that the origin no longer matters. / Growing up in New Jersey, I would say to people: / My dad is Canadian and my mom is Trinidadian.”
Poetry |
“Finding Work” and “The Set-Up”
“His bigotry costs him millions / in sensitivity training for all of us, back in the days / when that was punishment, teaching old- / dogs not to get caught.”
Poetry |
“North Sonoran, Year’s End” and “Man ‘o War”
“Good days, I can imagine / myself like this: // slowly weathered into / something less me, / what sounds like being erased // but is also less ego, less belief …”
Poetry |
“Don’t Do It — We Love You, My Heart”
“Julio De Leon is pedaling across the George Washington Bridge / his trim form, though sixty-one, leaning into the eastbound breeze // as tractor-trailers apply hydraulic brakes and shudder / in between the honking cars …”
Poetry |
“Vertigo Over the Niagara,” “Breaking Crystal Dragonflies,” “Red” and “On How the Russians Started Saying Goodbye”
“I sense in your Cuban voice that sorrow will always return / I’m trembling but it will always return and won’t do any good / It’s a bull bleeding in my memories”
Poetry |
“In a City I’ll Never Return To” & “The Cake in My Father’s House”
“Cake was supposed to be sweet, / though still I ate it, // said yes to a second piece, refused to refuse, licked my plate.”
Poetry |
“Wings” and “Caryatis”
“Bird bones frame the door of the cottage where girls about to be crushed by stones await the sacrifice of their sour clothes. I wait, too, like someone many lifetimes ago, already dead at the beginning of everything.”
Poetry |
“Say Their Names”
“People suggested she change her name, / but she thought not. No one suggested he change his, / she gently pointed out. At which the audience exploded.”
Poetry |
“The Shell of a Shell,” “Ives, I Did Not Look at the Finish Line,” “The Bus Stop” & “They Run Around with Stuntmen”
“You change horizons, too, when / you swallow saliva, dear // reader. We play with image like / the indigenous, Italicized. // I take whatever I’m prescribed, / low behavior’s / low behaviors …”
Poetry |
“The Speed of Light” and “William and the Fox”
“She wants to know, now, / how the skin told the lamp told the bulb / to pace itself — / to illuminate the dark in stages, / to prevent a shock.”
Poetry |
“Dear Henry Rollins (Former Singer of Black Flag, Now History Channel Host)” and “Artist Statement”
“And who among us, wishing form on the zeitgeist, / denies that the tension between profit and hatred can succeed // in unmasking the ghost as the greedy land developer?”