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Music | In the thick brushthey spend the hottest part of the day, soaking their hoovesin the trickle of mountain water the ravine hoardson behalf of the oleander. |
Music | Storms are generous. Something so easy to surrender to, sitting by the window, and then you step out into the garden you were so bored of, |
Music | —After Ana Mendieta Did you carry around the matin star? Did you hold forest-fire in one hand? Would you wake to radiate, shimmer, gleam lucero-light? Through the morning would you measure the wingspan of an idea taking off— & by night would |
Music | for Aja Sherrard at 20The portent may itself be memory. —Wallace StevensHow hard to carry scores of adults on your back,not look at them as carrions of need, the distressof what loyalty requires. This pain is |
Music | for Bob Marley, Bavaria, November 1980 Here is the brilliant morning on a fishing boat, this is the dream a dying man has in midwinter, the world covered in light and shadow—he dreams of St. Ann’s |
Music | For Frank X WalkerFXW: I don’t know how to swim Me: What?! FXW: There were no pools for Black Folk when I was coming up In sleep’s 3-D theatre: home,a green island surrounded by the blue of ocean. Zoom to the heart, see |
Music | My neighbor to the left had a stroke a couple years ago. It didn’t look like he was going to make it, and then he made it. I’m watching him now from my window as |
Music | —for a sixty-seven-pound nugget of Lake Superior copperfound in an Iowa cornfield Before the earliest flute was carved from a vulture’s wing, before we—what few we were— bowed to the moon, the balmy, secular night, you |
Music | —Issa Rae Everybody Black is my hometown team. Everybody Blackdropped the hottest album of the year, easy. Everybody Blackis in this show, so I’m watching. Everybody Black is in this movie, |
Music | "Save your hands,” my mother says, seeing me untwist a jar's tight cap—just the way she used to tell me not to let boys fool around, or feelmy breasts: "keep them fresh for marriage,” as if they were a pairof actual fruit. I scoffed to think they could bruise, scuff,soften, rot, wither. I look |
Music | “It’s all empty, empty,”he said to himself. “The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.” So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,thinking maybe that would help. He taught a little kid to build a kite. He found a cure,and then he found a cure for his cure. He gave a |
Music | (for Ntozake Shange)I used to be a roller coaster girl 7 times in a row No vertigo in these skinny legs My lipstick bubblegum pinkAs my |
Music | (the passports curled up) (it was so humid in our rented room)(travel to forget the criminal element) (in my bad blood) (Nothing very significant at the cemetery) |
Music | {on the occasion of Martin Puryear’s Noblesse O’ (red cedar and aluminum paint) at the Dallas Museum of Art}Perfect for picking up marbles, For finding, lifting, a favoriteBlade of grass, O’ magic elastic straw of the watering hole,Perfected for sucking, water, up, Then miraculously aiming back Around, into the mouth, mod implement |
Music | 1 Muddled stillnessAll summer SunPunched the yellow jacket nest Cavernous paper Valved like a parched heart Over and over I let it Beat outside My body No dark to cradle The living part2 The glare sears seeing |
Music | 1. lush field of shadows, static hush and radial itch, primordial2. goo of the sonogram's wandgliding across my belly3. my daughter blooming into focus, feathered4. and fluttering across the stormy screen, the way it rained 5. |
Music | 7. Letters arrived in intervals, as with everything else one might come, one might not regardless of whether there’d been a response. We prepared at all times. Bent over. We dreamed things would be different. Every time the door opened we each smiled in a way to make clear we’d |
Music | A crocodile slips its earth-toned bodyback into the river, in silence, violence down and for its nightnessI cannot see the water. With fearI am alone. Slick rocks smile thin anonymous light, they lieabout what I am. I see and try to hold my body in my body, trace a vein |
Music | A long night I spent thinking that reality was the story of the human speciesthe vanquished search for the vanquishedSounds come by, ruffling my soulI sense space’s elasticity,go on reading the books she wrote on the wars she’s seenWhy do seasons who regularly follow their appointed time, deny their kind of energy to |
Music | A man can’t die where there is no earth because there will be no place to bury him. His body is the sky and understands the language of birds. His body says the earth is made of everything that has fallen from Heaven while no one was looking. He promises to defy gravity and |
Music | A metal bunk bed A mattress and hard pillow Two lockers and one desk A toilet and sink A door that is closed Heat out the vent and it’s hot I’m sweating, yet it’s cold A night light on, yet it’s dark A sheet covers me Yet I want more than a sheet The floor is cold Yet I |
Music | A second death in as many days and I succeed at beingStrong and contained, until the tweetWhere one young brother says I’m not scared of dying, I’m scared of breaking my mother’s heart. I am flesh Two rooms down the hall from my mother’s flesh Holding in my hands the news |
Music | A shipping container of rubber duckies made in China for the US washed overboard in 1992, and some of them traveled and washed ashore over 17,000 miles over 15 years. Let’s go ahead and assume it’s yellow. What little of science I know: its plastic skin invincible against salt water, but not the |
Music | A woman has a window in her face: that is the truth. I look like my mother: that is the truth. I want to tell you I am not like her: that is the truth. I am ashamed walking in a woman’s body: that is the truth. I wish to |
Music | A year or two, mornings before school, our father came into our rooms with pliers.My sisters and I crammed into Jordache casings, Gloria Vanderbilts. We’d jump into jeans, tug them up our ashy thighs, abrade young skin with denim seams. Taut denimed butts on polyester Holly Hobby bedspreads, until they were painted on, until our |
Music | after a bottle of chianti Don’t mistake me, I’ve pondered this before. But tonight I’m serious. |
Music | After a century, humpbacks migrate again to Queens. They left due to sewage and white frothbanking the shores from polychlorinated- biphenyl-dumping into the Hudson and winnowing menhaden schools.But now grace, dark bodies of song return. Go to the seaside—Hold your breath. Submerge. A black fluke silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline.Now ICE beats doors down on Liberty Avenue to deport. |
Music | After Ocean Vuong’s “Prayer for the Newly Damned”Dearest Mother, what becomes of the girl no longer a girl?The stretch marks from my once breasts have migrated to their new tectonicflats. But you can always find hints of what used |
Music | After the exhibition “La Gravedad de Los Asuntos (Matters of Gravity)” The Mexicans and the Russians were always in on itThis is |
Music | after Tyehimba Jess Freedom is what you can buywith a left jab & a right cross. You’ve got the uppercut of a champ. On a sweaty August night, you watch Ramos v Ramos from the Olympic on TV. You |
Music | after Willie Cole Through the artist’s eyes, we catch this breath of fire, lifting water up to flight. This dead weight sinks our histories back into deep sleep, hidden away to dream of repair. Waking, we clutch at the real weight of a movable flood, catching streams that pour through metal still cold to the touch. Time takes little |
Music | All that is leftunaccounted for:elegance marriedto rust. On the roof, raindwelling in the corrugations.Some slats vanishedaltogether, a blanknessgiving way to sky. But the eaveshold in perfect vertices,refuse to abandontheir beauty, hard-earned.High on the yellow silo,the conveyor’s latticeis as finely wroughtas a string instrument’sstruts and braces: precisionin every coordinateand all across |
Music | although I know you can never be foundalthough I know that from the highest heightyou cannot be seen you are not hidingfrom me or are you is it how you look nowor maybe how I look now all these years gone byplaces seen people met not knowing at any timewho |
Music | And after the black boy is strangled by police, after the protests where the man, his Rottweiler on an iron leash yells, let's go mash up dis city and another crowd bulks, the parents of the murdered beg us not to become the monsters some think we already are—even when the barista shakes |
Music | And in the outer world, the first, something smooth and wet. An Xskims across the tops of the crests in a succession of skips. The longestholds its space in the air, pauses, then descends into what is a cool sleep. |
Music | And on the first daygod madesomething up.Then everything came along: seconds, sex andbeasts and breaths and rabies;hunger, healing,lust and lust’s rejections;swarming things that swarminside the dirt;girth and grindand grit and shit and all shit’s functions;rings inside the treetrunkand |
Music | And seriously now the guitar is beating me up It is shoving me into the narrow range of its cheerful melancholy And all sorts of feelings I want to have I cannot My feet start to move in exactly the same way They did for so many years each time I entered The tin shack |
Music | and there was light. Now God says, Give them a little theatrical lighting and they’re happy, and we are. So many of us dressing each morning, testing endless combinations, becoming in our mirrors more ourselves, imagining, in an entrance, the ecstatic weight of human eyes. Now that the sun is sheering toward us, what is |
Music | And those other females who managed to slip the collar for a moment or two of life were branded “bad.”–Clarrisa Pinkola Estés, from Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman ArchetypeThe secret nests in my marrow.At the striptease I appear pirouetteand prey. Later, |
Music | and Vievee Francis concerning love, redemption, and the TV show Empire |
Music | As from dark orchard leaves, from quiet scripts where each shape sends its tendril reaching— circle and line, the swaddled bud, the petiolesprung, an envelope tendered. |
Music | At daylight, he surrendered to the gutters’thick cirrhosis, his trajectory half awake, half anvil from the glass to the killing floor I was raised in, each thin thread tethered from the root of a nicotined toothto the rusted bars of the slammer.I couldn't tell you why Felix |
Music | At last understanding that everything my friend had been saying for the thirty-three months since he knew were words of the dog tag, words of, whatever else,the milled and stamped-into metal of what stays behind. Blackcap Mountain. Blue scorpion venom. Persimmon pudding. He spoke them. He could not say love enough times. It clinked against itself, |
Music | At the mosque’s entrance3:30 a.m. Syrian women beg wearing black gloves. Your father’s grandmother was Syrianbefore the country was ash.Before the government turnedto kill its people.What incites that internal blaze? What says it is me |
Music | Back of the door to his dark closet,eye height, with clever steelpegs I could flip both ways.A row of pendulums. Of tongues.Words, wordless. Witnesseswaiting to be sworn. The town secret.A silk body, a man's plenty.A wild ache, a knot. One paintedwith gold mums, one with bloodleaves on mud. Vishnu's skin, |
Music | Because I did not have to smell the cow’s fear, because I did not have to pin the man, watch his eyes go feral, because I did not have to drag the stonesthat formed in the child’s body, because I did not sheathemy hands in dank soil, or skirt the |
Music | Blush slash shocks callous London. Worth built his own house. Others consider cloth’s ripple, want a red flare to flaunt.Finery’s patterns indeed shift to threads, line draws down interred silhouette. But while we live awhile here pattern and line gatherquiet that is anything but quiet. Each time, dream delights as if a small wing beats, and leaves dance under |
Music | But my loyalty |
Music | By Hannah Ensor and Laura WetheringtonIn meditation my thought-labeling has gotten more specific: raging. capital. scheming. What is the nothingness before the storm? I have tried to be tzim tzum. I have tried to forget the word MARTYR. So many parts of my life are like that, like when the thought comes and I keep |
Music | Caliche. Great bird, woodsmoke, needle. Snake, owl. Nopal vibration.Almost every day |
Music | can be enough to make you look upat the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the fewthat survived the rains and frost, shotwith late afternoon sun. They glow a deeporange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single birdwould rip it like silk. You may have to breakyour heart, but it |
Music | Catapult through hills locking on air. So much of it the lungs won’t take it in.Then all’s a pinwheel, I’m the pin. The girl on her backhaving a tantrum on the drugstore floor until her mother stands up and leaves.The ladybug’s gunmetal legs pedaling machinely until they stilland fold. The body is an envelope. The air blackdiamonds and helium I’m far |
Music | Christmas Eve, 2016Before everyone died – in my family – first definition I learned was – my mother’s maiden name, ULANDAY – which literally means – of the rain – and biology books remind us – the pouring has a pattern – has purpose – namesake means release – for |
Music | Christopher and Helen, our new expatriate friends,meet us at their favorite winerywhere they fill their plastic jerry cans from hosesexactly like the ones at gas stations,as though they were planning to go back home to Aixand treat their lawnmower to a nice red.Instead, they take us in their forest green |
Music | Cinched belt tugged tight around the heart 5 or 6 aerial roots danglingA strangler figDo homeless ancestors live inside the tree? Child of noiseHold the loosened endsYoumay miss the moon or fall in love with it |
Music | Darkness wounds the barley,etching it with denser clouds. A herd sends itsenvoy out to nose the garbage atroad’s edge before creeping into the expanse.And the rest follow with cheap hunger—ten at once through the swaying curtain, headstipped, disappearing in the dim.Wrong to think of them as vesselsin which your feelings |
Music | Dead man’s fingers—short and stillor waving spindlesbrain coral,mountain coralground small—theywould be pebblesif they weren’t shardshiding placesfor trumpetfish and crabslive and dead coralWhat is sand made of?Who is to knowwhich is coraland whichis boneFrom the surface youcan see darkpatches where sea grassand spirit hair grow |
Music | Dear Empire, I am confused each time I wake inside you. You invent addictions. |
Music | dear reader, with our heels digging into the goodmud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me somethingabout the dandelion & how it is not a flower itselfbut a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown& lord knows I have been called by |
Music | dedicated to my 30/30 crewpraise daily poems in my inboxhow they make me laugh in one stanza,then break my heart the nextpraise how poets hold onto our first loves,and scent of mama, now gonepraise how we nurture our child self,gently wrap her around stanzas,baby girl is resilientpraise our spunk and |
Music | dew grass a fire shine mountain a lung pine cone the bone tsunami rock hawk jaw gravity a fall all consuming a song chirp for sunlight spine daggers cracking the sky an ocean paused in its crashing creature shake trip whistle rustle nut squirrel swish stump thunder or thump thump a swallowing you beautiful urchin you rot mound of moss. |
Music | Do you want to come in? Take a deep breath. The repo man is gone. All I had to do was show him My favorite gun And tell him about My conviction That a shame-faced galaxy Mutters a homily of return.The repo man will return With back-up So I promoted the orphan To vagabond. Why do you think they call it The |
Music | Every day I am born like this— No chingues. Nothing happens for the first time. Not the neon sign that says vacant, not the men nor the jackals who resemble them. I take my bones inscribed by thosewho came before, and learnto court myself under a violenceof stars. I prefer to become |
Music | Everything in the beginning is the same. Clouds let us look at the sun. Words let us watch a man about to be killed. The eye-hollows of his skull see home. When they stone him,he knows what a stone is—each word, a stone:The hole of his nose as dark as the door |
Music | February on another coast is April here. Astrology is months:you are February, or are youJune, and who isDecember? Who is booksread in spring, wingspanbetween midnightand mourning Another starry tree, coastalcounterpoint where magnolia isa brighter season peach and pear are grafted onto the same tree fear and |
Music | First, above all, I live forever. And thereafter redecorate paradise in the majesty of the Roof Nightclub, DJ Lucifer, at predawn hours terrifies the floorboards to give way to Apollyon’s abyss, reflecting scarred light on the wall. The mirror alive with tremors. Herons bring news of consolation. I rebuke them for my brilliance and enrich uranium in my |
Music | for M1.who conceived that ravineorthe contourof those slopesTorbay |
Music | For most in the United States the word brings a phase when mortars in Vietnam still whistled around them and the scandal of Nixon and his Machiavellian buds poured from the news into their subconscious—I see that Watergate too: the televised hearings, and in particular one session—Sam Ervin had just asked Ehrlichman or Dean or Haldeman, |
Music | for my grandfatherWe don’t have heirlooms. Haven’t owned things long enough. We’re hoarding us in our stories. |
Music | for NatalieSo much like sequins the sunlight on this river. Something like that kiss— remember? Fourth of July, with the moon down early |
Music | for the two of methe thing that eats the heart is mostly heart and thereI wish, in the burly sun blossom-backwards garden I was hungry,so damn hungry and afraid again by full open-mouth-desire.Don’t take this as a garrote good-bye, your airless thrive ride.I alone, fear being alone, far from the |
Music | for TomicaMy love is as ancient as my blood. And of course my blood is still mine because a woman, sweetened black with good song, pulled me from the river like an axe pulled back from the bark. I learned love, first, as scar. And of course my love is |
Music | From the island he saw the castle and from the castle he saw the island. Some people live this way—wife/ mistress/wife/mistress. But this story isn’t the one I’m telling. From the island he saw the castle and that made him distant from power and from the castle he saw the island and that made him distant from imagining what |
Music | Fruit from one vine tangles with another Making a mess of the intended harvest, yet the lack of calculation is welcome that accident that shifts bodies from shadows into a locus of light midday bright & caustic wounds un-healed newsreel cameras trap this old & angry man in a bespoke suit lifting white |
Music | given his showing up to teach at the Udisheveled, jittery cigarette and cigarette and probablythe drink, losing the very way thereover river, river of all song, all American storywhich starts way north of St. Paul quiet or undonewandering south, notenraged mostly, something stranger.That’s |
Music | Guilty Guilty Guilty for actions that took my sympathy Shackles around my wrist shackles at my feet Prom and high school graduation these eyes will never see My heart said, Oh well At least you will no longer have to endure your daily home abuse I grew into a woman unbalanced behind those wire fences Recall |
Music | Here we are, on top of the utopian arc. The water is shallow. An oil spill shimmers on the surface like a lens catches light and folds it in front of a mirror. If someone stands next to you, they are there, even when outside the picture. Which makes total |
Music | Here’s the End of the Worldmobile with its shiny bullhorn& platitudes among drawingstattooed across the beige hoodbig as a mammoth broken outof ice, bellyful of buttercups.Doomsday has come & gone,& now the sluggish van rollstoward the snowy East Riverat a quarter past midnight,& I wonder how it is to quita |
Music | His tongue shorn, father confusessnacks for snakes, kitchen for chicken.It is 1992. Weekends, we paw at cheapsilverware at yard sales. I am told by motherto keep our telephone number close,my beaded coin purse closer. I do this.The years are slow to pass, heavy-footed.Because the visits are frequent, we memorizeshame’s numbing |
Music | How is it you bring me back to the cliffs the bright heads of eagles the vessels of grief in the soil? I dig for you with a gentle bit of lighter fluid and three miniature rakes burning only a single speck of dirt to touch |
Music | I am enlightened, a mansays after dinner, and he doesn’tmean what you thinkhe means, he means he’s a productof the Enlightenment, he’s talkingover his pain in the abyssinside his gum, it’s calledan abscess (we actually call itthat, he’s taken painkillers,he’s swallowed themwith the wine offered him). |
Music | I am wasted on thought-so’s and photo-opsso-so’s and S-O-S cries and the lit flareI burn I intuit I follow your light look at the way you go into the tall grass into it |
Music | I began to die, then. I think I was asleep. Dreaming of an afterlife that revised my flesh into what I had wanted. Why do I think of Ronald Reagan the way one recalls vague nightmare: the sick heart and terror which is percussive. Was this the year I saw him at the airport. Men grimly tested my body for hidden death, waving a |
Music | I could have chosen to write this poem about the drastically entitled and out-of-his-mind-seeming white septuagenarian who, clearly upset, yowled I’M ABOUT TO BE UPSET, while turning to address a line-out-the-door post office like we were attending his performance art piece, who said he was going to BLOW UP THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT because YOU wouldn’t give him |
Music | I could string him back up the tree, if you’d like.Return his skin’s meaning to an easy distance, coal dust, blaze And Willie Brown him. YouLove how the blood muddies the original, The way it makes a stage of my speechifying, this |
Music | I crawled into bed and closed my eyes and not long after heard the small hooves of the horses, the tiny ones that gallop in our dreams, or are they the dreams of our children, galloping through the black ruins. Everything we do is against the crippling light. To hear |
Music | I cut myself upon the thought of youAnd yet I come back to it again and again,A kind of fury makes me want to draw you outFrom the dimness of the presentAnd set you sharply above me in a wheel of roses.Then, going obviously to inhale their fragrance,I touch the |
Music | I have oared and grieved, grieved and oared, treading a religion of fear. A frayed nerve. A train wreck tied to the train of an old idea. Now, Lord, reeling in violent times, I drag these tidal griefs to this gate. I am tired. Deliver me, whatever you are. Help me, you who are never near, hold what I love and grieve, reveal |
Music | I have waited all my life to find me find you perched around my black neck in reposesonging of me in repose |
Music | I know you knowhow to shame into obediencethe long chain tethering lawnmowerto fence. And in your gardenare no chrysanthemums, no hemof lace from the headscarfI loose for him at my choosing.Around my throat still twines a thin linefrom when, in another life, I wasguillotined. I know you knowhow to slap |
Music | I like literature that makes me think: |
Music | I like to say we left at first light with Chairman Mao himself chasing us in a police car,my father fighting him off with firecrackers, even though Mao was already over a decadedead, & my mother says all my father did during the Cultural Revolution was teach math,which he was |
Music | I love the whir of the creature cometo visit the pinkflowers in the hanging basket as she doesmost August mornings, hours awayfrom starvation to storeenough energy to survive overnight.The Aztecs saw the refractionof incident light on wingsas resurrection of fallen warriors.In autumn, when daylight decreasesthey double their body weight to |
Music | I love two dogs, even when they’re killing a baby possum near the columbines, shaking the varmint until the death squeal chokes to a gargle, and both dogs stand before the bloody marsupial nosing it to move, because that’s Nature, right? (And whom did I just ask whether that was right?) (And what’s a moral quandary |
Music | I never want to get anyMore new things.I wanna wear out these shoes whiteAnd walk on the rug till it's perfectlyColorlessTo wear the shoes darkWalking on an abyss that's been worn outThe shoes carry me,I can’t help it,I fly above the desert with no name |
Music | I told a million lies now it’s time to tell a single truth Sometimes I cry It’s hard dealing with my pride Not knowing whether to fight or flee Sometimes I cry Hard to maintain this image of a tough guy When deep down inside I am terrified If I ever told you I wasn’t scared I |
Music | I wake tored sand Isleep herecoral brickhooghaan Iwalk thinrabbit brushtrails side-step earlyautumntarantulas pick desertwhite flowerson full days Iinhale fe-male rainI stop wheelsslow sheepbounce dropsheep shitacross highwayspotholedme I grassnothinghere I meta-grass I sleep-walk grassesopen eyes toblue corn skyto cook upstews chunkshalf-chewed thruI am thissalivatingmouth withouthands with-out arms bent downshamelessface to plate tosome origin(al)hunger awarethat |
Music | I was trying to wave to you but you wouldn’t wave back |
Music | I watched in horror as the man hung half a pig by a hook in the window.Nearby, the sea shone or something. Nearby, the wingspan of a hawk cast an elongated shadow.I listened with horror to the words I was missing. A wrongness was growing in the living moon.& nearby, the sea rolled |
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