Notes on a Dream of Dying
I know this dream like the lines of my hand: a spark, unplanned.
Baffler Archives: Poems
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Penance
But it was I who held your arm as the three gravediggers hammered your father’s narrow coffin shut.
Fulcrum
1.
Across the river her voice sends shreds
torn from something gelid, all acute
angles though the surface of each call
is fur and dust. That last body a wraith
of small bones leaning forward whether
to blow her curses out or suck her souls
back in, it’s hard to say. In ...
Spine Surgery
nerve-root
cord in the tunnel
from mind to the far
extremities
the flesh tendrils
how they transit & exit
with more ...
How the Words Died
without heroism
/ guards falling asleep
/ a blood sky down
a storm of falsehoods blowing in
/ thick gray vortices
/ ...
Blue Rondo à la Turk
This rhythm is to us what the blues is to you.
The navel lint warming a cold index feels me. As in
the superfluous touch wagered for when, some days,
we idle too easily through life’s square, gray rooms
exchanging, mostly in repose—your affirming head-
nod. My ...
The Crystal Lithium
James Schuyler thought to call his book The Crystal Lithium
when he was my age without knowing he was going to die,
or knowing as much as he could because death was still
far away—the way I know I’m going to die.
I’m talking too much about my mother’s cancer, her ...
Pretty
I worked in an office where we hired a good-looking man.
It paid off in the hot tub at the office retreat.
What’s on the inside might get you a job
unless someone who is pretty is pretty on the inside.
I follow too many studs on Instagram, guys flexing
with coffee cups in the ...
Dehiscence
I forgot to say goodbye to the kids.
I knelt into my weeping until my heart
broke me awake. My forehead
touched the floor. If dream is memory
I was captured in a van, incarcerated. I was
and wasn’t a leader. The prison
was a camp in the wilderness. Its warden
was kind. ...
After Avery R. Young
Blk is not a country, but I live there
Where even the youngest call you baby.
Sometimes you ain’t we. Sometimes you is
Everybody. Washboard rains come. We
Open our mouths for a drink. Rather be radical
Than a fool. Oh and no,
We’re not interested in killing
White people or ...
What Light There Is
When there’s only enough light in the hall
to imagine a heaped shirt is the cat, to see
the books stacked on the dinner table, but not the glass
beside them that drops on its side under your fumbling
hand, spreads a dark pool and dribbles to the floor—
you close your eyes. ...
Almost a Mothering
Consider reduction—the five turkey vultures
making sleek dark circles above the field
this morning. They hunt by smell, I read,
but hunt isn’t right—instead they gather
from the air some wind-translated
sign of carcass. No punishment, nothing inflicted—
the angle of ...