Before North took a seasonal job / fishing for kings in Alaska / I’d never admitted to myself / that he was my only friend.
Inasmuch as our faces / bear resemblance, / now, to what // I imagine of them
Able only to recall / his parting footsteps—the chipping away at / a tree one fells at last
Through the window, what light gives / new meaning in the day.
Some days, I sail on an empty boat to a country I don’t know. / With my navy-blue passport, I can go anywhere.
Three nudes crudely drawn. One crouching,
back turned, right hand feeding the turtle
of the painting’s title; another sitting, as if in a chair,
head bowed, eyes downcast; and a central
Koreatown, Los Angeles
Gwendolyn Brooks stood stark naked.I stared into her bespectacled eyes.
Ms. Brooks showed me how to tend to myself by scrubbing dead skin
after Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt (1969)
My back is turned from him again, but this time I’m not hunched over the quilt—his rough thumbs gripping my waist—I’m standing
a woman who doesn’t read many poems asks is poetry meant to be
This life’s so small & // Sweet as a strawberry
We watched the women play harp in // The hills of grass
