poetry

  with lines by Louise Bourgeois   For a lifetime I have wanted to say the same thing. Daubing red   paint against the sky, taking it away in a different print. More blue then.   Laid down amid the … Read More

  My great-grandfather kept the peace / between the races / a man of two faces qualified, after being born a slave / to rectify and demystify the role of black men / before the throes of white sin. / … Read More

  Years passed just as years do, And I took my rescued cat, Unbruised, right to the shade Where we had planted a tree And I said to it, you can make A home of it and it did. Later … Read More

  Tell me how the sunset gets in a bird’s wings, how they carved that road to here. Two gray feathers decorate the walk between design and secrets.   Somehow, within the same stare, snow and palm trees. In another … Read More

  Teenage you wanted to speak English. Teenage you wanted to speak English in dreams. Teenage you wanted to speak English with no accent. Teenage you wanted to speak English by not speaking Chinese. Teenage you wanted to speak English … Read More

  The neurologist says the tissue is friable—a word I don’t know. I picture hissing oil, onion-tears. My grandfather tells me it means thin, easily broken. He seems to know every word, though he says I’ve discovered the only exception … Read More

  Does a match also serve to shed light on a given subject? what if it casts doubt, the light, instead of offering answers? what if the minimal light of the match works only by contrast to reveal the immense … Read More

  Comfort is important whether we remember it or not they say children never appreciate their parents enough they are right. We never forget the right things we write about petty grudges but never petty joys. Let there be more … Read More

  On the bayou there’s no one to sing to but the birds it is for them you feel sometimes a song in yourself pushing against your mind from your mouth and asking you to expand the movement but it … Read More

  I buried the seeds of my ancestors in the next generation but a blight took the harvest and rodents stole the granary walls from what they held now a container’s rolled onto the shore with a list of demands … Read More

  Visiting rural Tennessee, I lie awake in a small motel at the edge of a small town, the night throbbing with sounds so robust it seems impossible they could burst from the delicate woodwinds of frogs and crickets. Here … Read More

  In 2005 I was walking in Louisville, and a guy shouts out, “The TV’s watching you!” People are continually giving me things that I don’t know what to do with. A ceramic cow. Despair. Etc. So we say it’s … Read More