On Empire
The Roman sarcophagus shows Miriam, with her spangled tambourine,1 as she crosses the dead sea, women dancing as coral waves spread, their escape from Pharaoh captured in alabaster stone & gypsum red – will we too survive, our lungs flooded, the indifferent machine? & will we reach the other side? …
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Jazz and Life and the Other Sorts
Jazz’s analgesic, a loud lullaby of unhomed birds tweeting loss from the ugly side of paradise; a quarrelsome tide, an endless sigh, a wildfire, the groans of the boys who blacked out in chain gangs in plantations in human zoos, half-faces of the girls who wrapped their laughter in tignons …
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Tennessee
Tennessee, you keep taking my socks each time I do laundry. Every week, I have to buy a new package. Striped or plaid, it doesn’t matter, they will all be eaten by your machine. Bundles of cotton that protect my feet from my shoes which protect my socks from the …
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Tilework Illustration of Fox Among Grapevines
The yolk’s lush on the fox’s dark tongue— mosaic of shell in the dirt —all the generations come down to this bright furrow. They built us a nest, no promise of security only a hope for it. We were only ever invisible when our mothers hovered over us, but now, …
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O (After Hamlet)
And, like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing. The engine of your interval ranges blank across the hour. Blank along an inkblack importuning. A blankness rising like a little light. Blank blank my heart, blank my will and matter. These breathing clouds. Brightback the bodies of …
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balcony birds
blue-yellow mouth. uproarious birdsong morning. yesterday a mockingbird landed on the balcony. last month it was a pigeon. a construction crew is digging-up the street. the birds are louder, still. love-rotten morning. without you what’s the point. there’s leftover seed on the balcony. the feeder you made never brought a …
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little lie
he told a lie so small that the fabric of spacetime tore in a corner of his one-bedroom. he didn’t think much of it: there it was, dishonest sliver full of histories and futures, pulsating with starlight. whatever, he coughed, straight into the eternal depths of the hole. one day, …
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Suture Means Thread
With delicate spider silk we’re threaded together, though you are dead, and I am here feeling your burn in my right hip. It’s a protest song—the one you screamed as they rushed you to your death. Or the one your daughter hollered as she tried, tried to get there but …
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A Thing Not Kept
On the trail together, my husband hands me a piece of quartz that I examine then plunk back into the creek. It sounds like a fish gulping. At the bridge, the grandmother does not follow her family down to the river. She has been there before, has seen its coffin-shaped …
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Navigating
Listen: I could tell you the places I’ve been, the waters between. I could tell you of ocean after ocean, of boats like those quaint wooden ones people long ago must’ve trusted to ferry them through gorgeous, deadly distance. … The sort of day I merely exist, rain …
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