Poetry

Notes Toward the Great Floridian Novel I Ruth dusted the taxidermy alligatorwhere it stood menacing the front windowof her mother’s tourist trap shop in Alachua.Behind the gator hung Hawaiian shirts,other gators’ claws made into backscratchers,and American flag glass breakersin the…

Self Portrait of Boy as Venus de Milo The way the light bounces offthe skin covers blemish and bruise. In the light, the bodyis a shiny bronze. The shadowbetween the chest gives the contour of small breasts. If notfor the…

Grandma was murdered at 42 when gun violence was uncommon. Mom had to identify the body. The coroner pulled the sheet down without warning. The corpse stared back at her. Mouth wide open. How could mom even take care of…

There shouldn’t be cops in this poem.If we can’t be abolitionist in a poem, then where?But it’s July and there are cops everywhere & yesterdaythere was a beautiful balding man on west 14th,stooping & sweating like Frank O’Hara, dead 59…

Afterwarmth Sunlight staring coolly from the windowsill. Electric hush.White pulsing disco bass skipping from the street, the soupedup radio. Escape across a wakenight. O swooping garrulous lightninglines, O ice and melt and rising tide, O lavender flakes skyscrapedagainst the sunset—what…

Dibé be’ iiná From a Diné perspective, goats and sheep are emblematic of womanhood. My great-aunt would winter with sheep deeper in the canyons, move with them, care for the flocks. When I was a girl, my grandmother herded our…

Everyone I love is flesh, the kind that shatters in a bomb blast, that breathes a virus in and crumbles, that putrefies when there’s no room at the mobile morgue. At least four thousand one day in winter, overflowing.

I baby but do not cry. At night, I wander the shores looking for my tears in the sand. My footprints, just skid marks in a desert

tumbling into our ears again. The genealogy of sugarcane

I’m here to return a car I never rented. The clerk doesn’t ask questions his face already shaped by other people’s lies.

to measure the dark, to measure the lemon,the frost, crackthe swivel in the cart at rest, in the darkmarooned leaves mulch beneath snowso no now owna wood slab divorced from a treedisplays bare insidesforthright as an organwith no coveringbald without…

I am learning that one major function of a child’s life is forward movement. How lucky, to get to ride the coattails of unhindered propulsion.