Poetry

All the rain in the world

is falling, making
a door you can’t open.

I’m lonely and the only Black person inside the paid Cézanne 

exhibit today.

It isn’t the trees but the space

between the trees,

We made a dance of all the ways

we’d hurt our bodies.

I don’t lie, but I try to make myself sound worse off than I am.

Milk-tack, sugar cubes, cotton balls, chalk; 
coffee filters, marshmallows, artificial

It begins with a gesture and then grows

Because she paints barefoot, she’s barefoot in his painting
of her painting. Well, not painting, but modeling for him
as the painter she is and gazing toward her ostensible model,

You don’t start at zero. You start way below zero.