Cento for Breonna Taylor & All the Black Womxn We’ve Lost
Come celebrate come celebrate that everyday PUT_CHARACTERS_HERE_ that everyday something has tried something has tried PUT_CHARACTERS_HER to kill me to kill me & has failed & has failed PUT_CHARACTERS_PUT_CHARACTERS_PUT_CHARACTERS_Oh something has tried & failed? PUT_CHARACTERS_PUT_CHARACTERS_/// Sisters, I invoke you— PUT_CHARACTERS_PUT_C_Let’s gather in poem & lay to rest those …
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Grief for Breakfast: An Obverse
Today I have grief for breakfast— reach my tongue out of my mouth & lick my own tears. I’m keeping the whole of me. I call up a friend and we talk about black woman paradise— somewhere between starshine & clay. We lay there undead rest in the peace …
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Inheritance: Erosions
On the train, I dream my soft limbs fly over suitcases, rainbow faces of men looming like balloons. I wake to the station’s cries, Mama’s cool hands shaking me, metal and iodine in my nostrils, soap sheets melting on the floor, fans whirring. Summer like a crushed grapefruit. Mama’s dry …
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Correspondence
Dear cottage: my grandparents dwell in you, bordered by deep beech, spruce, and fir. Standing on your balcony overflowing pink and white verbena, they watch me walk up the gravel path. I’ve fetched milk, still warm, from the dairy down the road. Can you smell the brook where minnows glint …
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Pine on the Penobscot
Every spring, the drive from the interiors: Eastern whites cut off and floating toward the head of tide— the rigging of empire— hires aligning the trunks to glide through the deep runs, making for great works and the wide boom. It’s hard to be native and useful; hard to be …
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On the Recovery of Canis Familiaris from Sputnik 2, 1957
Before the launch, the mission scientist bathed her, dabbed her with alcohol and bruises of iodine. He kissed her nose. She had played with his children. In photographs, the hatch is open and she is posed, or is posing, one ear folded, the other heavenward. At launch, the saucer-sized porthole fogged with her panting. …
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The Catholic Anarchist
I had lost everything, or put an- Other way, I didn’t believe a thing. I was an adrift vessel, an at-risk Young person without a moral compass, And I’d just pawned my binoculars at A shop on 14th Street, so I walked down First Street near First Avenue in early …
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Hey You
Translated from Nima Yushij, 1941 Hey you, sitting on the shore, laughing in joy, someone is dying in the waves. Someone is constantly beating with his hands and legs. On this agitated, dark, heavy sea you see when you’re drunk …
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First Crush
for the monks Father Constantine returns from Mount Athos with ashes. They are magic, he says, it’s a mystery. I am thirteen, ready to marry, pledge my …
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When I Say I’m Sámi, I’m Asked, ‘What’s Sámi?’
I get my body talked through on elevators, as if no one saw me, and my uncle sawed the couch in half in his living room when he found out he was getting divorced, was out on parole, got put back in for ten years, and I do patrol as …
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