Poetry

how many of you sitting
here
think some woman of color
Black Brown Yellow White
woke up this morning thinking
“Goooolly … I can go to the airport
and clean toilets?”

In half-light of morning the red car appears / over the bridge, suspension wires like streaks of rain. 

Cheap child’s toy/ incompetent user/ pilot error—tangled and hanging / Sway, spin, climb, and fall on its ladder its helix of string / Pleuston (meaning dwelling on the surface) / (meaning sail meaning float)

When I sleep, you dream, turning and turning
on a soft earth.

Light drools down, blinds me. I can’t see your cheek
curve. Words rise

In the Sonoran Desert, my brother hands me a revolver. In place of tenderness
he tells me to kill a woodpecker. It’s injured, on its back like a sunbather
thrashing in a gravel bed.

If you like me will you make me better
look at your sandbox of a screen how my
bones have ground fine like my mother’s if
I promise

Where you are going
you cannot take
your things leave
in this locker the rivets
at the corners of your blue
jeans

There are so many things a body
can collect into itself
milk of a mother in a cup of coffee

Two Cooper’s hawks on an electric pole, facing
opposite directions. The larger bird hopped up to the 

top as I neared. I stood there until my eyes hurt.
Our eyes must be on loan. When we die, we 

have mercy nothing
prepared my body to lose its
brother nothing prepares a grown man to fall