Poetry

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 

Sometimes I enter the small chambers of the God of Forgetting 
and take my place at his feet 
and kneel 
and bow my head.

From here I can see the children
running across the long field 

for no other reason
than
they are fast. 

Apples belong to the genus Malus. I stand with my hips pressing into the sink’s marble,
rinsing and twisting these sandy, gunmetal stems out of the fat fruit 

I found a black snake on the porch, its body so 
still I didn’t dare breathe. Lungs arrested, I might 
have left my body then. It was long, a rope I could 
Double Dutch, a tilde underneath every word I try 
to love differently.

Swifts do not guard their time; they do not linger. When they come 
back from Africa, we are happy. I was told to go back to Africa. The sea, 
that stupid slate wedge, sparks with such beauty. I feel lonely. A car goes past,