Poetry

   I.       Original Work (Please do not touch.)  Throughout the gallery, ghosts, of all senses:  ordinary invisible ghosts that no one can see  except the blind, ghosts in the audio room that only  the deaf can hear, ghosts in the thresholds felt only   by phantom limbs, ghosts hanging around like paintings  suspended too high to be experienced as intended by […]

& in the beginning, God said          Get your money up nigga         You don’t know. If He really said this.           You have begun blurring. Your knowledge. Of Holy Word with the knowledge.           Of Self. You are Adam. No.           Eve. You don’t even use. The word ‘nig-          ga.’ Poor-spirit. That’s what God calls you.  Ma said marijuana’s a drug.          Just like the white ones. […]

              * The stain on the ceiling reminds me of an old boyfriend. I menstruated through his bed sheet. I hope he never got it out.                 * I am ready to accept  I’ll never be beautiful. No matter how I line my eyes, they can see.                   * Looking back,  I should have prayed less. My sins failed to thrive.  They died like lame animals.                *   My mother left me a wing-back chair […]

I would walk out past the tobacco barn and squint to find the three crosses on the mountaintop, and— I knew from hiking there—the stone outline of an unfinished church, but in winter the crosses just become all the leafless trees, black and bristly like the hairs on a hog’s back. My dad’s standard for […]

        It’s been raining in California for three days This morning I left a bowl of cherry seeds on the counter as a confession of my hunger         Winter seems to come later every year I invent new withdrawal symptoms to mark the days:the roof of my mouth, cold as a razor. A bruise just below my […]

    After Jimi Hendrix     For Joe  I met him when my lungs were clean, typically after dusk, escaping unsupervised into our own night club, where a dark bird beckoned through a haze, electric  in its longing, leading the way to my future amplified  by smoky ruin. I’d like to say I don’t do things only when sad  chimes tell […]

We didn’t care that missiles in Cuba were aimed at our homes.  We were twelve-year-old girls running barefoot through wet summer grass in the dark, headed for a slumber party in the bomb shelter. Cinder block cavern carved into basement corner, walls lit up in buttercup yellow― a curious Cold War feng shui conceived for […]

A man on the bus lifts a cigarette  from the pack and lets it dangle from his lips. He gets the lighter from his pocket and sets his thumb  against its spark before the bus stops.  It makes me think we all want  what we have, plus a little more, like the warmth of a stranger’s smile on the street,  or smoke to sting […]