Peace be with you— // another you, another morning, waiting for the train / metallic birdsong screeches
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Carlos Santana or Jimi Hendrix or Chavela Vargas or the crushed Daffy Duck pinata / on the floor or an evening baseball game…
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You fantasized about fossils as a kid. / Told me you wanted to get a tattoo / of a sandpiper’s skeleton cradled in the convex nest / under your eye.
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water rising sickly / to the bone of your ankle. / walking wet lawns, / kicking rain up and birds / in your passage.
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When my new doctor tells me, / Humans average about 19 pain-free days a year, / I say, /That’s sad.
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A nighthawk has come with the night, / a whip-poor-will more like to // snatch moths and caddisflies / above the trees at dusk.
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My father first taught me the family business of tongue. / I gummed clumsily the long vowels, the clipped / consonants. I spelled them in my sleep.
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She dried dishes, sang and twisted to Tutti Frutti, and perhaps / paused, getting newlywed moony over Secret Love, and upped the / volume for Blue Suede Shoes, sung by a mannerly boy…
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I’m indignant in front of an instruction manual / because I detest being told what to do // in such a concise, no nonsense manner.
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All of us have done it at least once, / or want to do it. Immediately after / you’ve read this poem, you might do it.
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“I wander down to the scrappy village, / and drop in at the butcher, where I pick up / rabbit, to brown, and simmer in saffron with rice.”
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“This ripe beginning of decay doesn’t bother me. It reminds me of uncooked chicken, oily, / the cheap kind. My mother would leave it on the counter for a whole day, forgotten about / it in a spell, scalding; spit soaring, palms open.”
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“He is oil, and oil is blood, and / blood is thicker than The Bible. His boots are thicker than the Bible. / His boots are leather made of old Bibles. His boots Are the Bible, / and the stool is the oil.”
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“Across generations, I—a child, an ass, / a pubic hair exposed—developed. / I longed for violation called love. / Dissociation altered my spirituality.”
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“A moment, then, of reckoning, / as the world burns and the institutions fall; / a weightless second dangling from the precipice of change / between the way things were / and the way they need to be.”
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“eyes watering like mine did at dinner after that call, my mom, / who lets the soft pages of her sorrel-colored bookstore bible lap at the toes of her shame like / waves, asking “why.” she didn’t ask “why” the way she asks my sister when she cries (her sins / are soft, white, and small. you can roll them in your hands like pieces of tender gnocchi)”
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“I ache for a daughter I’ve never wanted, / all squish and small and gasping. / I cannot throw her back into the sea and she dies.”
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jaawo a ye / bambo balanta / baa baa
for the enemy carries / those mandinka who resist / across the sea, to Europe.
enemy carri / Mandinka / cross sea